This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s Apocalypse 1999 imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to ac- tual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental. Or Copyright © 2020 by Sady Doyle The Devil In Jenny Long Cover design & illustration © 2020 by James Curcio Interior illustrations © 2020 by Benny Hope being A Mall Gothic Novel Content Warning::! This is horror. Worse, it's about high school. Watch out for deadnaming, misgendering, casual ableism, r--* slurs, religious abuse, bullying, by gaslighting, discussion of sexual assault, adults creeping on teens, bugs, rats, gore, death, and "Ace Ventura." Not all of the good people are going to Sady Doyle live. Part Three: Terror Twilight Table of Contents Chapter One: Jenny 132 Interlude 138 Chapter Two: Nick 144 Chapter Three: Jenny 151 Part One: The Last Day on Earth Interlude 157 Chapter One: Nick 8 Chapter Four: Nick 158 Interlude 16 Interlude 166 Chapter Two: Jenny 17 Chapter Five: Nick 167 Chapter Three: Nick 28 Chapter Six: Jenny 170 Interlude 36 Chapter Seven: Nick 175 Chapter Four: Jenny 38 Chapter Five: Nick 49 Part Four: We’re In This Together Chapter One 188 Part Two: The Day the World Went Away Interlude 194 Chapter One: Jenny 55 Chapter Two 202 Interlude 64 Chapter Three 209 Chapter Two: Nick 65 Interlude 210 Interlude 72 Chapter Four 217 Chapter Three: Jenny 75 Chapter Four: Nick 80 Credits Chapter Five: Jenny 87 Chapter Six: Nick 101 Chapter Seven: Jenny 110 Chapter Eight: Nick 114 Interlude 129 NOTE TO THE READER (if you exist)

There are three things you need to know that no-one has ever told you: (1) The apocalypse began outside of Columbus, Ohio in 1999. Part One (2) The Devil rose to reclaim the Earth. (3) We started it. We’re sorry. We assume you know about the apocalypse. The rest, however, has remained a secret until now. We, the guilty parties, have assembled this collection of docu- ments and witness accounts, detailing the how and why of the End The Last Day of Days. I would like to tell you that we did this to give your suffering a rational explanation. For the madness that ensued, however, there is no rational explanation, nor ever shall be. Say, then, that we did it to unburden the lingering darkness of our souls. on Earth — NICHOLAS A. CASINI

“Lingering darkness of our souls?” Jesus. This is how we sum- moned the Devil. If you read this, you’ll see it was a bad idea, and then you won’t do it. Also, there’s no way I trust Nick to put this thing together without being extremely dramatic and using the word “darkness” 1,800 more times, so I’ve added footnotes. Thanks for reading, and have a great day! I mean. Relatively speaking. — JENNIFER C. LONG

First of all: I barely ever use the word “darkness.” Secondly, we didn’t discuss footnotes. No-one’s going to read a bunch of foot- notes, Jenny. — NICK —

Please read the footnotes. — JENNY APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH

CHAPTER ONE and unflattering, and which she had been wearing, in pro- gressively larger but still basically identical models, since third grade. She was blonde as a girl on a German beer label, with a soft, round face that still belonged to a child, NICK and if you saw her in that circle, you would worry for her: What’s a nice kid like you doing in a Satanic ritual like this, you’d wonder, assuming she’d been pressured into this hellish It began in darkness. In a salt circle, on the floor, perversity. That impression would be wrong. This girl is sigils were drawn. A certain arrangement of numbers and the most dangerous person in the story. Nonetheless, it is planetary signs was made, suitable to the purpose. With- what you’d think. in the circle, a pentagram; within the pentagram, a trian- The second summoner, you’d worry about for differ- gle; within the triangle, the most forbidden tool of the ent reasons. He was a skinny, wiry boy, all sharp angles, summoner’s art, a black mirror. It gleamed with reflected but handsome, with wild black hair and large dark eyes candlelight, like a fragment of the starry void; an unholy that glittered with quiet anger. He missed nothing, this portal, a hole punched through the fragile skin of our re- boy, and he forgave nothing; fools on his watch were not ality, a gate opened to the unthinkable, allowing the thou- suffered. His face was sharp and gaunt, the skull’s shape sands of Hells beneath our world to seethe through. visible beneath the skin; his eye sockets were hollowed out You can make your own black mirror at home, by the with eyeliner that went past “emo” and on into “missing way. It’s easy. If you read to the end of this, I’ll give you member of a KISS tribute band.” His eyes glittered with the instructions. quiet anger, unless I’ve said that already, and also with The room of the ceremony was pitch-black and clouded quiet intelligence. His hair was super rad. He was hand- with smoke. In its center, huddled over the light of a black some. candle, were the summoners: A pale, frightened girl and a Oh, all right, you got me. That one’s me. This was me, boy with a knife in his hand. age eighteen years old, still very deep in my Goth phase. The girl was almost disturbingly normal: Suburban The blonde is my best friend Jenny. My hair was gigantic. white girl, standard-order, like a composite sketch of every I still haven’t found a cool way to describe my eyeliner. model who had ever been featured in a DeLiA’s catalogue, or There was nothing cool about that eyeliner; it was a trag- a computer-generated image of the exact median audience ic mistake that marred my childhood. But I loved it, at member at Lilith Fair. The only thing standing between her the time, and you’re going to find out more embarrass- and total anonymity were her glasses, which were plastic, ing things about me eventually, so please just accept it for

8 9 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH what it was. Pencil me into your mind, gentle reader. Give I mean. It was my bedroom door. It was my mom, stand- me eyeliner you can forgive. Make me handsome. ing at the top of the stairs — my bedroom was, by most “Omphagor, seventh of Hell’s seven Generals, Fiend people’s definitions, our basement — letting the late after- who givs’t glory,” the boy (I) intoned. “In thy name we noon sunlight spill down and wreck our ambiance. But a gather, that thou mays’t arise.” door did open! So there. “Arise,” Jenny repeated. “Girls?” My mother called down the stairs. “Time to get “Omphagor who brings’t portents of the Change,” I a move on. Big day coming.” said. “Omphagor who commandeth the Swarms, and the Here’s where I stop and explain some things. Vermin Tide, loosing the Sea of Blood.” I was working the ritual from memory; tracing my * * * tongue along the curls of its strange, dangerous language. I’d spent hours learning the script — pacing back and forth Girls? You’re thinking. What girls? He said there was only in my bedroom all semester long with the pages I’d Xe- one! Surely Nick Casini, my good friend who’s been narrating this roxed from an old library book, until it was so much a part book for over 800 words now, would not lead me astray! of me that I sometimes woke up mumbling the lines. You First of all, yes, I would. I’m a necromancer, a summon- can ask me why I bothered; it’s a good question. I never er of demons, and worse than that, I’m a Gemini; I talk asked. a lot, but you should never assume you know what I’m “Omphagor, bringer of Torpor and Confusion,” I said. thinking. Second: Even though all this is true, I did not “Omphagor, who bestoweth Pleasure of the Flesh. Om- actually lead you astray this time. I simply gave you the phagor, who drowns the world.” proper context in which to process what my mom said, I raised the ritual dagger up and drove it, hard, into that context being: Me. the floor. As I closed my eyes, I could feel it — the black I will get this out of the way now, and then we can stop swoon of magic, some irrational force rising through me, talking about it,1 but one thing you should know about me raising the hair on my neck, crackling the air around me is that I’m trans. That means a lot of people mistook me like static. It could be a placebo effect, I tried to tell myself. for a girl until I was in my twenties. People will mistake I could be willing myself crazy. But it never felt that way. me for a girl in this story, several times. My friends won’t, It felt like a tide made of oil and milk, slicking around me, because they know me — Jenny over there, she knows carrying me off somewhere. I chanted and let a black door me; she was the first person I told, back in freshman year, open in my mind. Soon enough, the door in our world opened, too. 1 He’s not going to stop talking about it. — Jenny.

10 11 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH when neither of us even knew there were words for it, or with Trevor Murphy, nor was it fun to share a gender with other people like me in the world — but in suburban Ohio him, but I comforted myself with the knowledge that I was in the late ‘90s, it was dangerous to even be gay. The only already better at both than he was, and once I got out of thing anyone knew about transgender people came from high school — the end of Ace Ventura: Pet Detective, in the scene wherein Right. Where was I? I’m trans. Let’s move on. Ace, whose previous life accomplishments included talking through his ass cheeks, threw up because he’d met one. I’m * * * a brave man, but I was not about to subject myself to four years of non-stop Jim-Carrey-inspired violence if I could “It was going to work this time,” I said, as Jenny clicked help it. So that was my situation: Safe people knew, most the light on in my bedroom. people didn’t, and I was stuck that way, dangling halfway “It really, really wasn’t,” she said. out of the closet, until college. Fortunately, Goth girls and In the lamplight, all the familiar wreckage came back Goth guys don’t look that different, so I could make myself into view: Rob Zombie CDs and The Crow posters, concert surprisingly comfortable without anyone noticing. A lot of shots of Trent Reznor covered in mud taped to the corner dudes at our school wore too much eyeliner. of a mirror; Marilyn Manson, in his new apocalypse-space- I mean, there was one other dude. His name was man outfit, with red hair and tits, glaring out at me from Trevor, and he despised me. Trevor spent all his time my nightstand. The walls were covered in Sharpied pen- talking about the distinction between real Goths (him) and tagrams and song lyrics and the snarling, unfortunately mall Goths (me), between real Goth music (the kind from distorted face of Jonathan Davis, from the year I took AP the ‘80s) and stuff that was “just, like, heavy metal” (any- drawing and got a little too confident. Yes, that’s Jonathan thing I liked). He said the phrase “that 4AD sound” more Davis of Korn, by the way. When I told you that you’d often than any non-fortysomething had any right to. He learn embarrassing things about me, I didn’t mean trans had been on the wrestling team until he bought Disinte- stuff. I was ahuge Korn fan. For, like, years. gration in junior year. He claimed to have gotten high at God, I loved that basement. My parents never made me Outlands with Damon Zex, this dude who ran an all-Goth clean it; Jenny insisted we have all our sleepovers at her public access show in Columbus, and whose two claims place because she was afraid she’d get typhus. There were to fame were that he might have inspired an SNL skit and whole meals rotting in odd corners. Clothes under my that every single Goth in Columbus claimed to have got- mattress had developed mold colonies complex enough to ten high with him.2 It wasn’t fun to share a subculture make vaccines, or really expensive cheese. My parents had tried to make one corner of it the “computer room,” and 2 Claimed! Don’t sue us, Damon! — Jenny 12 13 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH my filth had just grown around it, so I was the only mem- course, we would, and on the floor next to her was the rea- ber of the family with a strong enough stomach to use son: My graduation cap and gown, and hers. This — Friday, AOL. I think of that basement so often, so sadly, because May 28, 1999 — was the day high school ended. We were it’s all gone now, and so is the house around it; my home being set loose, out of childhood, into our grown-up lives. was one of the first places we destroyed. Also, pretty much everyone we knew would be dead “I’m telling you, we’re getting better at the summon- within twenty-four hours. This was the last day before the ing,” I said, picking carpet lint off my black jeans as I stood apocalypse. I’m sorry I hadn’t mentioned that yet, but the up. “I finally memorized the whole thing.” thing about our friendship seemed more important. “So you can summon Hell later,” Jenny said. “We have the rest of our lives.” We’d done the ritual maybe a dozen times that semes- ter. Jenny had been humoring me at best. Today, I could feel some special impatience radiating off her, a loud- er-than-usual undertow of grow up already. I sensed that in her more and more often these days; a sharp, stinging little edge that I nicked myself on every time I got too enthused about magic or played a Korn CD in my car.3 That was on the days I could get her to hang out at all. It got to where I stopped telling her things. I was afraid of that new, mean, paper-cut voice of hers. Some days, I wasn’t even sure we were friends. Today wasn’t one of those days. She slipped on her shoes, throwing an arm around my shoulder to steady her- self, and suddenly I could see her again; that soft-faced, soft-hearted girl, my shy little sister, my sidekick. Jenny, who lived across the street from me, who I’d seen every day since third grade; Jenny, who I would know forever. I felt bad for even thinking we could grow apart. Though, of

3 Every girl reacts this way when you put on a Korn CD. — Jenny 14 15 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH

— INTERLUDE — CHAPTER TWO GRAMPA NICK’S CRAFT CORNER How to Make a Black Mirror Jenny You will need: - A standard-sized, glass-fronted oval picture frame. - Black spray paint. If you saw our high school sitting there, on the green - Courage. lawn in the summer sunlight, you would assume it was a place where only good things happened. 1. Open the picture frame, temporarily removing its Nick and I were lucky to go there. That’s what they backing. For a cleaner look, remove the glass as well, and told us. At some point, our suburb, Darbyton, got too big place it on some newspaper for painting. for just one high school. It was split along the center into 2. Cover one side of the glass with black spray paint, being sure to completely coat the surface area. West and East. Or, if you want to be super pointed about 3. DO NOT paint both sides of the glass; spray paint it, the “good” parts of Darbyton and the “bad” ones. Nick is matte. Keep one side unpainted for that all-important and I lived on the block where East turned into West, mirrored finish. where good became bad, because I guess the world works 4. When paint has dried, restore the glass, unpainted by drawing those distinctions. Nick and I weren’t good, side out, to the frame, along with the backing. but we weren’t bad either. We lived right on the line. 5. Kneel over the black mirror and mutter words of In the end, we got sorted west. That’s why they called imprecation. us lucky; we could have gone down with the rest of the 6. Uh-oh: A demon came through the mirror! neighborhood. But Nick and I weren’t West kids. West 7. Oh, no! What’s that you say? It’s angry? It has a kids lived in giant houses that still smelled of fresh paint; thousand teeth? they had private swimming pools and violin lessons; they 8. Stop screaming! I can’t make this out! It seems went to Ivy League schools and won internships. Nick you’ve been killed by a demon. Is that correct? and I went to one West party, freshman year, and we kept 9. Okay. That guy’s dead now. I assume the rest of you getting lost, because somehow the house we went to had were too smart to start a craft project without reading all three separate kitchens. Maybe we would have gotten used the instructions first. Here’s the important one: to it eventually. I don’t know. We were never invited to a 10. Never make a black mirror. second party.

16 17 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH

Nick and I had one kitchen apiece, and we looked like waiting for the ceremony to start. Parents were ushered to it. My mom had been single since I was in second grade. the upper level balcony, so they could watch the ceremony. It wasn’t a loud divorce, no thrown dishes, no restraining Students were shoved down close to the orchestra pit and orders; he just moved out of the house, then out of the the stage, so we could rise when our names were called. state, then stopped paying child support and vanished al- No-one was in their assigned seat yet. They were running together. So we wound up in the neighborhood she could around, chatting, hugging, making crocodile tears at kids afford, just me and her and a rotating cast of eight hundred whose phone numbers they wouldn’t know next summer. boyfriends. Nick had both parents, but neither one was No-one was sitting down, except Hardy. rich. His mom was a part-time receptionist. His dad was I’m telling this story because it’s my story, too; I was the deli manager at Big Bear. Normal people; the kind of there for things Nick didn’t see, I know things he couldn’t people we grew up expecting to be. Who needs more than tell you. I’m also telling it because, knowing Nick, I figured one kitchen, you know? you could use a break. Nick is Nick’s favorite comedian, Maybe things would have been better if they’d sent us if you hadn’t noticed. He’s also his own favorite philoso- to the “bad” school, if we’d grown up around other kids pher, male model, professor, clergyman, and sex partner.4 who shopped at Salvation Army, whose homes still had But the real reason I agreed to do this, the thing that con- bad shag carpet, whose “gap year” was working at Tim vinced me to finally tell this story, is that someone has to Hortons. Maybe. I’ll never know. Maybe this is what peo- explain Hardy. ple do, try to think of ways their lives could be better, in- He was a boy made for taking cruelty. You couldn’t miss stead of accepting the lives they have. him; he was gigantic — six foot five, I heard once, though I just wanted to say: If you saw our high school — our that seemed like a low number — and wide to match. It beautiful, rich high school, with its huge green lawns, its ought to have been scary, how big he was, but on him, the glittering trophy case, its gigantic, expensive glass atrium bulk didn’t look forbidding. It made him look helpless, a — you would think it was a place where good things hap- gentle circus elephant stranded with abusive carnies who pened. For Nick and me, it never, ever was. It was a bad flicked lit cigarettes at its hide all day. His hair was messy place, a dangerous place on the best of days, and that was and wiry and curly, his glasses were never quite level on his before we filled it with blood. face. He wore the same short-sleeve button-up basically all twelve months of the year. Hardy had wide blue eyes, like * * * a newborn, perpetually goggling out at the world, amazed

4 Bite me, Jenny. We’re editing the same document, by the Inside the auditorium, people were still milling around, way. I read your Korn footnote. — Nick 18 19 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH by how awful the people here had turned out to be. ra was incredibly beautiful in a way that says “I peaked in That amazement was the closest he came to protest. high school,” and somehow, it said this even though she What was strangest about Hardy, what really got peo- was in high school at the time. Chris was her boyfriend, ple riled up about him, was his serenity. His expression unless her boyfriend was Billy; both were football players, never really changed. His voice never got louder. People and though they weren’t identical, or even related, if I told destroyed him, all day long, and he just floated above it; you they were, you’d buy it. Debra trailed both boys after not angry or defensive, just quietly, gently disappointed. her like Secret Service agents, letting them hurt her ene- I think he’d tried to fight back a few times, back in grade mies and compete for her favor. Nick always insisted there school, but the teachers always punished him worse than was some sort of polyamory going on, but “amor” means the kids who picked on him. If you throw things at a giant, “love,” and Debra loved no-one. you’re playing a prank on him. If the giant throws those Nick had seen the cup hit Hardy, too. Unlike me, Nick things back, he’s a threat. thought he could do something about it. Before I could That was Hardy, the only boy in school less popular stop him, he was charging toward Debra, down the aisle. than Nick and I, and now that you know him, you’ll know “Hey,” Nick said. why I didn’t want jokes in his introduction. There were a He was head down, shoulders forward, his whole lot of jokes about Hardy, and they were all awful. He had skinny body one knot of tensed muscle. I hurried to catch to survive our sense of humor every day, including this up, like always, trying to keep my breathing slow and my one, because, right as Nick and I pulled up to our seats be- expression friendly, hoping I could de-escalate things be- hind him, Debra McAllister’s pet football player Chris was fore Nick got punched in the neck and died at his own throwing a half-full Big Gulp cup at his head. graduation. The lid dislodged on impact; a slush of ice and Sprite “Hey, Columbine,” Debra said. and spit poured down the back of Hardy’s seat, soaking She’d taken to calling us that in the past few weeks. All his neck. If he reacted, I didn’t notice. Debra dissolved those kids dying had really upped her comedy potential. into laughter. I saw her leaning in to whisper something at Billy laughed in a way that reminded you he got hit in the her other guy friend, Billy, her dark, gleaming hair brush- head a lot. ing his face like a silk curtain. I heard the phrase “mentally “We have ten more minutes of high school left, Debra,” retarded.” Nick said. “What’s wrong? Worried you’ll leave without Do I have to explain Debra McAllister? Do I have to causing any teen suicides?” explain her goons? Every town has a set. I feel bad for “The ceremony is about to start,” I said. “Can you just even including them; it makes my youth feel generic. Deb- leave Hardy be until it’s over?”

20 21 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH

“Why?” Debra said. “Did Marilyn Manson tell [SOUND his bony jaw, radiating crazed David-and-Goliath energy. OF ANGRY SWARMING BEES]5 to kill anyone who both- “There’s no Trenchcoat Mafia,” he said. “People just ered the special ed kids today? Is the Trenchcoat Mafia made that up.” going to take out a hit?” “Oh, so you study them,” Debra said, dripping the words “Come on, Debra,” I said. “Just leave Hardy alone for out like sugar syrup. “They’re like your heroes.” a while so you can go say goodbye to your friends. That’s “They’re not my heroes. They weren’t Goth,” Nick easy, right? Everyone here will miss you.” said. “They just believed some people mattered more than Debra nodded, accepting my tribute. It wasn’t glorious, others. They thought your worth depended on what you my way of dealing with Debra — she felt like she was bet- looked like.” ter than me, and I let her, until the rush of superiority “What you ‘look like’ is a tragic accident on the set of drowned out her bloodlust — but it got the job done. At Rocky Horror Picture Show,” Debra said. least it worked better than Nick’s methods, which usual- “That’s true,” Nick said. “I’m different. Some peo- ly wound up with him getting pushed into a wall at high ple look different. The Columbine guys hated that. They speed by football players. wanted the people who looked right to be in charge. They “You know, the Columbine guys were Nazis,” Nick said, wanted to hurt everyone who wasn’t like them. Who didn’t pulling up to Debra. look like them, didn’t act like them. They thought being These were Nick’s methods. Debra loomed over my on top gave them the right to punish everyone else.” very punchable friend, powerful and unimpressed. Nick cast a glance over at Hardy. Debra, involuntarily, Nick, I should specify, weighs about fifteen pounds af- followed suit. ter a heavy meal. Debra could bench-press him, and she “The Columbine guys wouldn’t like me, Debra,” Nick looked like she might try. Debra was pretty, but she played said. “They would really like you.” volleyball. She wore four-inch heels to homeroom, possi- He turned and walked away. She didn’t stop him. She bly to sleep. The girl took up space. She also had two large was supposed to have a comeback, to call him ugly or gay almost-adult men behind her, ready to dole out punish- again — it didn’t have to be clever, she just had to get ment if anything offended her delicate feminine sensibil- the last word in — but he’d thrown her. She’d run out of ities, which it turned out that standing up to her always things to say. did. Nick glared up at her anyway, one muscle popping in I saw him receive her silence; there was a quiet lit-ciga- 5 She didn’t say “sound of angry swarming bees.” She said my rette flicker in his big dark eyes, a cruel, happy glow. At the dead name. It’s the name people called me, before they knew I was end of the day, after years of abuse, she’d flinched. And, Nick, and it makes me unhappy. Therefore, it will make you unhap- at the end of the day, he hadn’t. Nick walked away from py, too. Sorry. — Nick 22 23 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH

Debra without looking back, and she didn’t sic her boys, really see me, but I don’t mind it. Hardy also blocks out and that was the end of high school, and they both knew my mother’s boyfriend Timothy, and Timothy is someone it. I walked away with him, head held high. I prefer to forget. When I tell you I loved Nick, I want you to know I This was the last normal afternoon of my life; it was mean it. I loved his belief that things could always be set the last afternoon of most of these people’s lives, period. right, and that he was always the one to do it; the way he I should remember it better. I didn’t appreciate it, I guess. charged into the world, on six different kinds of fire, trying All I remember is collapsing on the curb next to the park- to slay every dragon he saw. It was just that I also believed ing lot with Nick, ripping our stupid polyester robes off in — I knew — that one of Nick’s dragons would eat him. I unison. Everyone had finally left us alone — even our fam- thought he would eventually pick a fight he couldn’t win, ilies; they were used to us wandering off together — and wake up something too big and ugly to deal with and re- we could talk. fuse to back down while he had the chance. Nick never did “So that’s it, then,” Nick said, looking off into the dis- a thing without overdoing it. He never told a joke without tance. taking the joke too far. I thought that he’d eventually take a The sunlight revealed the full horrors of his outfit: The risk he couldn’t walk back, try to prove himself against the long mesh sleeves of his undershirt, the threadbare black wrong enemy, and that when he did, he would get some- NIN t-shirt so baggy he could use it as a tent in an emer- one killed. Which, you know, is exactly what happened. gency, the tremendous black JNCO jeans billowing around him like a dirtbag cassock. When he moved, he jangled; * * * chains, buckles, cheap pewter pendants engraved with sig- ils that were probably made up in the grody strip-mall of- The rest of the afternoon passed by in a blur. Names fice of the company that sold them. I could never figure out were called; we got up, we sat down, and when we stood how high his boots went, I guess because some part of me up, we were still kids, and when we sat down, we would knew I couldn’t handle that information, but I know they never be kids again. I remember stumbling out onto that had elevated soles and rows of buckles along the sides. green lawn in my cap and gown, taking lots of photos. I “That’s it,” I agreed. “There goes high school.” still have some. Nick is standing, stone-faced and spooky, “Best years of our lives. Some would say,” said Nick. next to his parents, who are ruffling his hair and beaming “Some went to better high schools.” at him as if he’s made of winning lottery tickets. Debra is I stood up, smoothing my cargo skirt as I went. Yes, I in the background somewhere, posing between Billy and said cargo skirt: It was 1999’s biggest skirt trend, like cargo Chris. Hardy wandered through half of mine, so you can’t pants, for if you wanted to preserve your femininity, and

24 25 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH if your femininity could only be expressed via the world’s That’s probably a bonus for you, right?” I said. least sensual pants. It went all the way to the ground. It He didn’t laugh. I settled back down next to him on made me look Amish. I said Nick looked bad, but I never the curb, feeling the warmth of the summer-baked asphalt told you I looked better.6 coming up through my eighteen pounds of cargo fabric. Nick stayed on the ground. He was chewing his lip, “You made it,” I said. “You can show up at college next grating it back and forth between his teeth, and squinting year and just be Nick. No-one will even remember your off into the parking lot. He looked as if he’d lost some- other name. The hard part is over.” thing out there, as if he was waiting for some important Nick still wasn’t looking at me. He bit his lip hard object to spark a glint in the sun and reveal itself. enough for the olive skin around it to go white. “That’s it,” he repeated, quietly. “That’s the end.” “The hard part,” he repeated. “The hard part is never “It’s what we were waiting for, right?” I said. “In fall, going to be over, Jenny. Not for me.” when college starts, you can do what we talked about. Go I wonder what would have happened if I’d asked him to a doctor or something and start getting… what is it, what he meant. If I had paid attention to the squint or the actually? Shots? Pills?” lip-chewing, if I’d realized how sad he sounded and hadn’t “Shots,7 I think,” Nick said absently. just written it off as Nick being Goth again, things might “So, it’s got sharp metal and blood and pain involved. be different. We might have prevented what was coming, 6 She looked like what would happen if beige were a person. saved all those people’s lives. Or maybe not. This is what You can question my aesthetic choices — and some do, JENNIFER people do, what I do, try to imagine that with one different — but at least I made them. Jenny’s outfit was a series of choices choice everything would be better. But we don’t get to go not made, a half-dozen paths of least resistance, all conglomerated back and make those choices. All we get is the apocalypse onto one very white teen girl. She was human Wonder-Bread. She was vanilla’s last stand. If she stopped moving, she would blend into we have. the background, like a stick insect. I can go all night with these. My boots weren’t that high. — Nick.

7 Things were not remotely that easy — they made you wait forever, and go to a bunch of therapists, and it blew chunks — but we’re going to blow right past that, because: It’s none of your busi- ness. We’re not going to stop and spend 500 words explaining how Jenny figured out her bra size, either. We were teenagers, you weir- dos; if you can’t stop wondering what our bodies looked like, you might need a couple dozen therapists yourself. — Nick

26 27 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH

CHAPTER THREE had Starbucks. We were little children, pure of heart, and this was all we needed. You probably want to know what I was thinking back NICK there on the curb. Not much, is the answer. I was look- ing at Courtney Scheiber, this horrifically tough girl I took shop class with. She was lighting up in the parking lot. Camels. My Mom smoked Marlboros. I was thinking about The horror didn’t begin until we hit the mall. how weird it would be not to live in a house that smelled Not that our mall was horrible. It was the tits. The like cigarettes, how my whole life to date had that one Easton Town Center was brand new the year we graduat- baseline stink of old, stale tobacco. I was wondering what ed; Les Wexner, our local evil billionaire,8 wanted to put I would feel on Christmas, walking into that house again. all the stores he owned in one place. There was an outdoor How the smell would hit me. courtyard where bands played, a bunch of restaurants, a Jenny was right, by the way. If I’d said any of this, back big glass-vaulted central building with a Planet Hollywood then, a lot of people would still be alive. movie theater at one end of it. They’d bring in costumes and props from movies, so you’d get to walk past Darth Vader’s original suit on the way to Star Wars, or some- * * * thing. Arnold Schwarzenegger cut the ribbon at the open- Most of that last afternoon — after the necessary logis- ing. More than a mall, the newspapers said, a lifestyle center! tical finagling, finding the parking spot, rolling through It’s been a long time, since they built Easton, so I know Starbucks to pick up our Frappucinos; they were chocolate this was bullshit. Telling you how big the free-standing mint, and they each had about a can of whipped cream Virgin Megastore was (real big!) is not going to blow your on them, and though masculinity is wonderful, and I am mind. You might not even know about Virgin Megastores. secure in mine, I will tell you the worst thing about it is Kids are young these days. But Easton certainly was a life- no longer being able to order those drinks without being style center, in that Jenny Long and I spent our entire life- stared at — was spent discussing the Timothy Problem. styles in it, when we were not at home or school. It was Specifically, Jenny was discussing it. Timothy had been where you saw movies. It was where the Hot Topic lived. It dating Jenny’s mom for most of our last semester, and in 8 Figure of speech! Not literally true! He’s really rich, and his that time, Jenny had racked up the hatred of a thousand name sounds like “Lex Luthor,” and kids used to make jokes about lifelong enmities. Everything he said or did made her glow it, so don’t like, search for “Les Wexner + evil” or anything! Don’t with rage. I mean, I didn’t like Timothy either. He had ve- sue us!!! — Jenny 28 29 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH neers and said “see you later, tater;” he would stand there my mom.9 and stare at you, angrily, if you didn’t pretend to laugh. Yet “He showers,” Jenny continued. no-one could hate Timothy more than Jenny. God doesn’t “He showers?” I said. hate Satan as much as Jenny hated Timothy, because Tim- “He stays in my house, when my mom goes to work, othy was a stranger to her, whereas God and Satan used to and he showers. Like he lives there,” Jenny said. “I have hang out. to be like, ‘oh, well, there’s a full-grown man in my house, “So proud of you for graduating,” Jenny said, repeating naked, and I can’t make him leave.’” Timothy’s latest unforgivable insult. “So proud of me! “You can’t make him leave,” I said. He’s known me for seven weeks! How proud can he be?” “He’s going to move in, you know,” Jenny said. “When I As I say, this had been going on for a while. Jenny was a move out, bam. He’s just going to slide right in there. He’ll gentle and unassuming person, most days, but she had that be there on Christmas. Can you imagine what my first vis- Midwestern white-woman rage that comes out in gushes; it home is going to be like?” you could tell she would grow up to be the lady who bakes That’s when it started; that’s why I’m the one who saw twenty pies for the PTA bakeoff and poisons ten. All you it. Jenny mentioned Christmas, and I suddenly had an im- could do with that anger was witness it. Or duck it. In an mense, overwhelming need to look at the ceiling. She kept emergency, you could just take the last phrase Jenny said, ranting, not noticing where my eyes were, and high above and repeat it back to her. She would believe you were be- us, a single bird plunged out of the sky and broke its neck ing profound. against the glass of the ceiling. “How proud can he be?” I said. Jenny nodded, fiercely. “I mean, he’s just so weird,” she said. “My mom’s dat- * * * ed guys before. But they had shame. Timothy, like, walks around my house in his boxers.” “I hope I’m dead,” Jenny said. “I hope we all are.” It was true. He did. I’d seen it. I may give you the im- The bird was high up, far away, so you could barely see pression Jenny was overreacting, which she sort of was it. Still, I could see the glass reddening around it — its — people have lived through POW camps without react- little body exploded by the impact, bones shredding out ing as strongly as Jenny did to Timothy — but it was also through the feathers and dripping blood. true that the man had unconventional ideas of personal Another one hit, right next to it. Two in a row, I thought. space. I’d seen his thighs up to a high-water mark that I’m That’s weird. pretty sure met the legal qualifications for child abuse, and “I mean it,” Jenny said. I didn’t have to live with the knowledge that he’d banged 9 This was gracefully said. Thank you, friend. — Jenny 30 31 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH

Two, then six, then a dozen. The web of blood was radi- of the screams were pain. I stopped looking, at a certain ating out around them clearly by now, leaking down both point, dragging Jenny under the arch of the Planet Holly- sides of the vault. It was a whole flock; a family, all get- wood entrance, trying to get us clear of the damage. ting lost in the same direction. I hoped there weren’t too Her eyes never left the catastrophe. They were wide and many of them. It was getting to be like birdie Jonestown fixed, and her body felt stiff, like dragging a mannequin. I up there. was lucky; I’d seen them coming. So I knew to look away, “I hope that thing happens where the computers stop when it got really bad, but she didn’t, and couldn’t, for a working, and all the planes fall out of the air,” Jenny said. long time. “And I don’t have to spend Christmas with Timothy, be- After a while, it got quieter. I cast about, looking for cause a plane crashed on our bathroom, and he was in it.” something to say. Some way to snap her out of it. “Wait. Is he in the plane, or the bathroom?” I said. “Do you want to go see Star Wars?” is what I came up I could feel Jenny’s glare burning holes in my exposed with. neck. I turned back to her, and as I did, the sky got darker. Jenny shook her head, still staring at the food court. “Sorry,” I said. “Maybe Omphagor will kill him.” “No,” she whispered. “Omphagor’s not going to kill anyone, Nick,” she said, I mean, she made the right call. It was The Phantom Men- in her paper-cut voice. “We’ve been over this.” ace. Still, I felt bad. “Yeah, well, Y2K doesn’t happen until New Year’s Eve, dummy,” I said. * * * She was about to fight me on that one when -it hap pened. The whole world filled with the sound of splinter- After the mall evacuated, we sat out in the courtyard, ing glass. Metal groaned and bent and twisted. Thousands drinking emergency Frappucinos. People were hurt, some of birds — hundreds of thousands, a sky of them — fell of them badly. Some were dead. Ambulances were being through the glass ceiling and into the ground floor of the loaded out by the entrance. The broken glass glittered in mall. the pale yellow summer sunlight, and it seemed strange They hit the food court, mainly. That was the worst for anyone to be dead on such a nice day. I slurped up thing. People were diving and shrieking and still unwit- my second can of whipped cream, feeling the sugar fizz tingly holding yogurt cups filled with bird guts. Glass through my bloodstream and dissolve my bones, and to an splintered and ricocheted in pieces as long as an arm or extent that appalled me, I felt normal. as little as a bullet. I saw blood, I heard screams, but I’m “What do you think caused it?” Jenny said. not sure how much of the blood was human, or how many Jenny did not feel normal. She would keep tugging at

32 33 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH this thread forever, I could tell, unless something worse “I don’t know why you do these things,” she said. happened — although, lucky for her, something worse “We do them,” I said. “Ever since we were kids. soon did. Remember?” “Birds have those magnets in their nose they use to “Little kids,” Jenny said. “Ouija boards at slumber par- navigate, right?” she asked. “Do you think that’s what ties. It was fun, Nick. I just don’t know why we do it now. happened? Did their magnets break and steer them into a You know?” building?” She was trying to be nice, and I wanted to lean into it, “Or they were blind. Or they were overcome by despair. just let her be nice to me. Still, I recognized the tone in her Or they just really hated food courts,” I said. “I’m not a voice. It wasn’t affection. It was pity. No matter how sad I bird scientist, Jenny. I don’t know how they work.” get, I’m never going to be enough of a sucker to forget the “Something has to have caused it,” Jenny said. difference. She did this with upsetting things, worrying at them “Maybe the world is bigger than what’s right in front of like a loose tooth. She had a soft heart, and ugliness sank us,” I said, stiffly. into it, sometimes so deep she couldn’t pry it back out. It “What’s in front of us is an American Eagle and a P.F. was my job to get her buoyant and trivial again. I tried for Chang’s,” Jenny said. “I don’t think Satan is going to man- a distraction. ifest in an American Eagle next to a P.F. Chang’s.” “I mean, the ritual…” I didn’t get the chance to argue. The doors of the Amer- She whipped her head around, suddenly all the way ican Eagle opened, and the worst man alive10 — the source present. of the change in her, the cause of all our problems — walked “Stop that,” she said. “We didn’t kill a bunch of birds. out into the light of day. We didn’t kill people. And if we did, you shouldn’t be happy about it.” She was angry. How could I not realize she would be angry? She was always angry at me these days. Suddenly, I was angry back. Sick of her mean grown-up voice, sick of being scolded, sick of being told what a child I was by someone who was in fact three weeks younger than me, someone I’d actively watched out for my whole life. Who would Jenny even be, without me? Who was Jenny now, that she acted so far above me all of a sudden? 10 Not Les Wexner! — Jenny. 34 35 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH

— INTERLUDE — it “could happen any day now.” Vigorous dispute on logis- tics cut short by phone call. Extracurricular Attendance Record March 5, 1999: Coffee; cancelled to have coffee with Jennifer Campbell Long the Cinnabon creep. Grade 12 March 11, 1999: Phone call; cut short to call pastry Darbyton West High School eater on the phone. March 22 - 28, 1999: Spring break. Some portion of Oct. 31, 1998: Snuck out of house at midnight to at- every day spent calling or socializing with random food- tend graveyard seance; spooky. court man, whom she is now, I guess, dating? Tori Amos concert at the Palace The- Nov. 12, 1998: April 2, 1999: Seeing The Matrix at Planet Hollywood; ater; cried. post-movie discussion cut short after catching sight of Dec. 21, 1998 - Jan. 4, 1999: Winter break. Some por- douche in lobby. tion of every day spent with respected colleague in intel- April 9, 16, 23, 24, 1999: Seeing The Matrix again at lectual discussion. Planet Hollywood; cut short, cut short, postponed, can- Feb. 14: Joint evaluation of school’s (outdated, offen- celled. sive) policy requiring students to bring dates to all (boring, May 8, 1999: Guess who has a prom date? dumb, shallow) school dances. Principled stance taken May 28, 1999 – Present: Chaos. Mayhem. Death. to boycott all such (awful, homophobic, not Goth, sexist) Graduation. End of world. functions, especially (boring, dumb, sexist, anti-trans, did we say dumb yet, fascist????) senior prom. February 27, 1999: Sleepover and demon-summon- ing ritual; spooky. Plan of going to mall next morning sub- mitted and approved. February 28, 1999: Easton Town Center; attended. Wandered off while chaperone was in Hot Topic. Located twenty minutes later talking to full-grown man in line at Cinnabon. March 4, 1999: Spirited discussion of CNN article “Are We Headed For A Global Y2K Crisis?,” located while looking for current event to bring in to Civics class. Judg- ment from respected colleague that Y2K is not a “current event” because it is “not real;” other parties maintain that

36 37 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH

CHAPTER FOUR of me as a little kid, his baby sister, his sidekick. For better or worse, he had always been better than I was at attract- ing attention. Now I had something he didn’t have; I had someone who treated me like the interesting half of our Jenny friendship. Nick couldn’t stand it. This whole past semester, Nick had been going nuts I just loved Dave so much. over the Summoning of Omphagor, insisting we do the How to explain Dave? The world went into slow motion ritual over and over; making me play pretend, like a little when I saw him. Sunlight became his halo, shimmering off kid. It was such an obvious reaction to the Dave thing. He his white high-tops, his perfect teeth, his messy hair. The was drawing a circle around me, penning me up inside our Goo Goo Dolls started playing on my mental soundtrack. It shared childhood. He was ordering me not to leave. probably shouldn’t have been the Goo Goo Dolls, it should I would love to tell you I thought all this as Dave en- have been some weird indie band whose last record sold tered the courtyard, but my mind was very elsewhere. I four copies and that only Dave knew about, but that was was looking at the ripple of bicep through his band t-shirt, the power of Dave. Your own soundtrack was always a lit- the glints of red the sun drew out of his hair, his jawline.13 tle too tacky to capture his mystique. Something tremendous played in my brain, “Iris” maybe, Dave was my boyfriend, my actual boyfriend, my first that one song that basically dares you not to make out to one, and even more unbelievably, Dave was cool.11 Nick it. Then Dave was next to me on the bench, throwing his had hated Dave on sight.12 arm around me, and I was out of my body, looking at how As Dave approached, I felt Nick sigh, and sneer, his lucky I was, the handsome man’s girlfriend I’d suddenly whole body contracting into a cranky little fist beside me. become. It was a familiar routine, and frankly, it was one I had learned to stop paying attention to. I knew Nick thought * * *

11 Dave was old. — Nick “Wild scene in there,” Dave said.

12 Because Dave was old! He was a full-on adult man in his Yes. Yes! How could I not have seen it? There was blood twenties, at best, who should not have been hitting on high school and glass, people got hurt, but I didn’t need to lose my girls in food courts. Jenny acts like hating him was some irrational mind about it. It was a wild scene, something to react to whim of mine, but you, my intelligent and evolved reader, would not be mystified by my reaction. — Nick 13 His oldness, his agedness, his oldness; his aura of great age, and elderliness, due to being old. — Nick 38 39 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH with amazement. Not the end of the world. “So’s Ed Gein,” Dave said. “Did they tell you what caused it?” I asked. Dave had the ability to do this, keep smiling, keep his “Birds navigate by magnetism,” Dave said. His voice tone reasonable and friendly, no matter how hard Nick rumbled through me as I leaned on his chest. “All the TV tried to offend him. I knew that Nick hated it; Dave made broadcasting stations and power lines can throw it off him feel powerless. Dave knew it, too. I should have told sometimes. Drive them a little crazy.” him to stop, but I didn’t want to. What would it cost my “That makes sense,” I said. friend, my best friend, to just be happy for me? How hard “Does it?” was it to be nice to my boyfriend? At the far end of the bench, Nick was looking at Dave Well: Nature might have Ed Gein and dead birds in it, like he had just seen him shoot, and eat, the family dog. but it did me a favor. A line of ants, nearly a dozen of “It’s been fifteen minutes,” Nick said. “How did Dave them, began marching down my arm, and I jumped up here find time to consult the Bird Science division?” and shrieked. Dave followed me up, brushing my arm off “It’s called the ornithology division, actually,” Dave carefully. It wasn’t new, but I never got over it — having said. someone treat me that way, touch my body like it was the Dave’s tone was pleasant, but he locked eyes with Nick, most expensive thing he owned.15 having some weird silent wrestling match: I am happy to “They’re after my drink,” I said. My voice was shaking. entertain this insignificant weirdo’s intrusion, said Dave’s face, I hoped that I just sounded scared of ants. and I will personally bury you alive just so I can spit on your grave, “No wonder,” Dave said. “That thing’s mostly sugar. said Nick’s face, and please stop fighting so I can have sex once You should let me take you out for real coffee some time.” before I die, said my face, but neither of them ever looked at I nodded, mutely. my face once this part started. “Now’s good,” Dave said. “The record store closed ear- “[BRAKES SCREECH TOO LATE AS THE STEERING ly for bird death.” COLUMN PLUNGES THROUGH YOUR CHEST] must Yes, Dave. Yes. Take me away from these malls and milkshakes. have liked it, huh?” Dave said. “She14 likes the dark stuff.” Give me adult beverages, lest I die of thirst. “Ed Gein’s dark,” Nick said, his face tightening. “This “Jenny and I had plans, actually,” Nick said. “For grad- is just nature.” uation?” 14 Watch how many times Dave says “she.” It’s not a normal But we didn’t have plans. Or rather, we’d had the same amount! Dave would talk about me in the third person while talking plan for most of high school, which was to go off together to me, like he did right there. I am telling you: Something was wrong and wander aimlessly through some mall. This mall was with Dave. — Nick 15 “Owned.” Jesus. — Nick 40 41 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH closed, and Dave was right next to me, radiating summer and imaginary language glossaries in the back, and I had a sunlight and boy smell, and Nick had been making me pre- VHS box set of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, and I had a Star Trek tend to believe in magic for months, which is why I did communicator badge that I got at a theme park. I wore what I did. I ditched him. I made some vague noises about it pinned to a yellow sweater so I’d look more like Lieu- it — oh, you can come with us; come with us! — but Nick knew tenant Data. If you’re imagining something cute, some lit- the score, and so did I, and when I walked away from that tle whiz kid, stop. I wasn’t good at science. I wasn’t good bench, holding Dave’s hand, Nick was still on it. at anything, except reading, which was why I snuck my I cast a look back at Nick, as I reached the parking lot. own books into my desk and read them in class. One day, He turned his head to the side and pretended he didn’t I brought in my favorite, The White Dragon by Anne Mc- see me. Beneath his feet, I could see the ants. They were Caffrey, and the teacher took it away and ripped it in half. seething out from under the bench in a dense black cloud, Just ripped it, right down the spine, to teach me a lesson. so thick they looked like one wriggling, twitching animal; I cried for hours. Everyone saw. pouring up from a hole someone ripped in the world. So that was me, for the next ten years of my life: I was the dumb, crying reject who liked dragons. Once they * * * knew I was a safe target, every kid in my class went in. It was only a week or two after the White Dragon incident Courtney Scheiber spat on me once. It was the day I that Courtney — this big, blonde wrecking ball of a girl, a made friends with Nick. We were in the elementary school clenched fist in pigtails — walked up to me in the cafeteria cafeteria, third grade, and I was eight years old. and spat in my food, so I couldn’t eat it. She was a messy What have you learned so far? You’ve learned that I spitter. Half of it hit the plate. The other half landed in my have a best friend, or someone that I call my “best friend;” hair. you’ve learned that we kept secrets from each other, that Nobody flinched or looked around or said you can’t do we disappointed each other, that we hurt each other’s feel- that to her. You have to have friends, if you want someone ings and seemed to spend most of our time bickering. You to stick up for you, and I didn’t have any. So I just sat there, don’t see it yet: How every moment of this was soaked in staring at a tray full of chili I couldn’t eat. I could feel the lost love and history, how I could not look at Nick without tears welling up again. I knew I would cry, and I knew I remembering a thousand thousand moments when Nick would make things worse by crying, and I couldn’t stop Casini was all I had. it. Then, suddenly, so fast it shocked me away from tears, So start there: Courtney spat on me, in third grade, and Nick slammed himself down in the seat in front of me and nobody minded. I was the class joke. I had books with maps shoved half of his sandwich toward me from across the

42 43 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH table. seizing a kitten by the scruff of its neck — I said yes. I recognized him; he was the kid who lived across the That was it. I just kept saying yes for ten years. We lived street from my new house, the one who used to take his so close to each other that we basically lived together; in Barbies and put them in greasy McDonald’s bags and set sixth grade, when his mom was so sick, he used to just them on fire. They melted and bubbled into puddles on come over to my house with his blanket and pillow under his sidewalk. Sometimes a lone hand would stick up from his arm, barking I’m sleeping at your house, Jenny. His parents the ooze, unmelted, pleading. Sometimes the doll puddle let him, because he wasn’t more than a few feet away from would have eyes. I’d asked him what he was doing, once, his own bedroom. and he’d just said they’re witches. After that I stayed away I know Nick and I were an odd couple, or at least we from him. He scared me. I mean, everyone scared me, es- looked like one; maybe other kids found friends who pecially Courtney Scheiber, but Nick scared most people. dressed like they did, who liked the same things they did, Still does. kids with whom they had something in common. What Then Courtney spat on me, and Nick was there, hand- Nick and I had in common was that there was no-one ing me his food. I didn’t know why he was staring at me exactly like either of us. We were together because we so intently, arms folded across his puffy sweatshirt, and I were so alone. didn’t ask. I thought maybe it was a trick, another mean thing someone was planning to do to me. Maybe, if I took * * * the food, something bad was next. “You going to eat that, or not?” he eventually said. “I just don’t see the value in that,” Dave said. “It seems “It’s yours,” I said. like it’s not really friendship, you know? It’s codepen- “You don’t have anything to eat,” Nick said, slowly and dence.” patiently, as if he suspected (he did suspect) I was stupid. I was on Dave’s fire escape, under the hazy, - cham “We have to share this now.” pagne-buzz glow of the paper lanterns he’d strung along It was the way he said it, we have to, like he’d been as- the railing. Dave lived in the real city, Columbus, right on signed to watch over me by some agency. Like he had no High Street. Below us, I could see the neon glow of night- say in the matter. I took a bite of baloney and Kraft cheese life and street signs, college students stumbling in and out and Wonder-Bread, and I thought about how nice it might of bars, sequined going-out tops flickering like fireflies. be to have a friend who scared people. When he told me Little bits of other people’s conversations, shouts, soror- to come over to his house after school — again, didn’t ask ity-girl squeals, floated up to us. This was grown-up life me, told me; took charge of my afternoon like someone and I was in it. In my hand was a mug of coffee.

44 45 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH

We hadn’t come straight back to his place. We’d gone YOUR COFFEE AS YOU DRINK IT] could help it,” Dave to see a movie first, something with Reese Witherspoon. said. She was a suck-up kid and the guy who played Ferris Buel- I never knew how to handle Nick’s name. I should tell ler was her teacher. He wanted to sleep with her. It was the you that. He told me not to tell anyone at school he was kind of thing you could never sell to Nick, who wouldn’t trans, to let him leave town first so he could handle the see a movie unless he’d been promised someone would flow of the information. Still, the more I used the right die. He would have tried to go see The Matrix for the fifth name, the more the old one sounded wrong and ugly. It time in three months, studying the leather trench coats was like I was humiliating Nick, showing people some like they were literature. We would have wound up in his soft, raw part of him so they could gawk at it. If I said any- basement, watching people rip their own eyes out in Event thing else, he wouldn’t be safe. Most of the time, talking Horizon. There was always a lot of Laurence Fishburne in- to people, I tried not to use a name at all. volved in letting Nick choose the movie, for some reason.16 “We’ve been there for each other,” I said, “for a long But I liked Dave’s movie. I mean, it made me feel weird, time. Our lives would have been really lonely if we hadn’t unpleasant, everyone in it was a jerk, but they were sup- met.” posed to be; the movie made you feel that it was childish “I can’t imagine you ever being lonely,” said Dave. to want to see stories about nice people, that the real point How was I supposed to explain it? How do you explain of stories was complication and unpleasantness, the diffi- what lonely means to someone like Dave, who never would culty of Ferris’s life, wanting things that made him a bad be? Telling the truth would mean showing him my whole person. story: Crying in the cafeteria, books with dragons on the Girls and their teachers; girls and men who could teach cover, the girl who spit in my hair. As far as Dave knew, I them things. That’s what I thought love was, in those days, had never been that person. I was his sort of person, some- and I was in that, too, with my terrible skirt hiked up and one in his same league. Dave would never spend time with my bare legs swinging over the iron railing. the girl who cried into her chili. No-one would, except Still, it was amazing how Nick managed to work his Nick, and even Nick got pretty sick of me sometimes. way into every conversation. “When we met,” I said, “I had this pin. This Star Trek “There’s good there, too,” I said, not selling it even a communicator pin. I wore it everywhere.” little. “You just haven’t seen it yet.” “Yeah, I know, you were little kids,” Dave said. “You “I wouldn’t see you, if [ROACH SKITTERS OUT OF told me that already. You’re not a little kid now, though. 16 Because Laurence Fishburne rules, Jenny, that’s the “some I think [ROACH SKITTERS OUT OF THE MUG AND reason.” I was probably a worse movie partner than Dave, though. OVER YOUR FACE] wants to keep you that way. Stuck He had that senior citizens’ discount. — Nick 46 47 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH in some old version of yourself, so you’ll always need her. CHAPTER FIVE She can’t see the special person you’re becoming.” Then, somehow, suddenly, it was gone. I want to tell you it was just that sad little girl and her chili, but it was Nick, too; it was the sense of myself as his kid sister, his NICK project, in need of his protection. Dave was right; he was perfectly right. I was becoming. I had the right to become something. I didn’t have to be loyal to that little kid and Sometimes, at night, I could feel myself.17 her dragon books, she didn’t need me any more. I needed I’m going to pause, here, and let Jenny get what I as- me now. sume is the inevitable masturbation joke out of the way.18 I wanted so many things, and if that made me a bad per- What I meant was that I felt like the person I would be. son, it was just complication, it was just how grown-ups No-one looked at me or talked to me or called me by the felt. I wanted to spend time with someone other than Nick wrong name. I would just sit in my room, listen to mu- for once. I wanted to fold Nick up and keep him in my sic. Talk to other guys on message boards. Read through pocket, take him anywhere anyone might hurt me. I want- old Sandman comics, or the one I really liked, From Hell. ed to be a grown-up, to savor unpleasantness like a strong Jenny had borrowed half the Sandman comics looking for taste, to drink black coffee. I wanted romance and sugar Tori Amos references, anyway. From Hell was not a Jenny and whipped cream. I wanted what you want, when you thing. It had innards. let your boyfriend take you back to his apartment, because Everyone does that stuff, you’re thinking, and you’re I hadn’t been there yet, and I had never done that before, right, that was the point: For a while, I was everyone. My and I had spent so long wondering if someday, somebody bedroom was my own planet, a world built to hold me, would pick me. where I could be whole and unobserved. I felt myself sur- Dave leaned over to me and picked me. He did. I leaned facing, the adult me shimmering through my skin. I knew into it, the grown-up taste, the bitterness in his mouth, he was inevitable, and I rose to greet him. My skin and the and I let myself feel chosen. My child self receded into the distance, becoming a speck on my horizon, waving and 17 Yeah, he could. And how! — Jenny shouting something I couldn’t make out. Help, maybe. Or stop. From a distance, they sound the same. 18 Thanks, buddy! And thanks for showing up. I assumed you broke both your hands typing mean notes all over my Dave chapter. You’d have trouble feeling yourself after that one, that’s for sure. — Jenny 48 49 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH way I live in it is none of your business. What I’m describ- tricycle around the neighborhood, except those bears can ing is not gender, it’s childhood: You, whoever you are, keep their balance. Now here he was, straddling his tiny surfaced through your old body, too. steed in my driveway, looking down at me with not-quite- concern. * * * “You all right?” Hardy said. I nodded. Sometimes being alone was like that. Sometimes it “You want company?” was the worst feeling I could name. That night, I grabbed I did. I really did. I shook my head. every candle I owned and put them out on my lawn in “I’m fine,” I said. the dark. Each of them had a specific function. I had stud- It wasn’t about rejecting Hardy. Jenny thought I was ied to bless them with the right oils, learned the correct insensitive about Hardy, that I made too many jokes about him, but I knew him better than she did. We hung out. He planetary colors for each purpose. I collected the real shit, was my one guy friend, a status that was complicated by the not overpriced New Age junk, but stuff thatworked, cheap fact that, in sophomore year, I’d kissed him. I was drunk, seven-day candles with hearts and opened palms and cats on peppermint Schnapps Jenny stole from her mother, and printed sloppily on glass casing. FAST LUCK. BLACK CAT. I had something to figure out, and I did. I figured out that CUT AND CLEAR. All of it was precious, scraped togeth- I did not want to kiss Hardy. Attraction to men was still an er on allowance money. All of it was power. unresolved question, mind you, still an open spot on my I lit all of it on fire at once, on my lawn, because who sexual-identity Bingo card; people who were attracted to gave a shit. Magic was made up. It was junk. I had spent men usually didn’t want to kiss Hardy either. all my money on junk and I sat in the center of it, watching But Hardy knew that about me — that and the other my power burn. You’re a joke, I thought, repressing the urge relevant details; he knew my name, and how to think of to put it all out, to save even one candle. You’re a joke you’re me, which he accepted with the same thoughtful inter- a goddamn joke you can’t do anything right, and I repeated this est he’d shown when I told him we wouldn’t keep kissing to myself until Hardy’s bike pulled up in my driveway. — so he’d do this, when I was off by myself. He’d offer Hardy never really learned how to ride that bike. He company. It was weird, largely silent company, but I didn’t was, I assure you, a committed student; he rode it south mind. People treated Hardy like he was Forrest Gump, but from his neighborhood to mine every day at sunset, wob- he was a smart guy. He got into NYU. He became partic- bling as he went. It was just that he’d waited until he was ularly appealing when you considered that my only other nearly eighteen to learn, and also, he was too big for any option for male friendship was goddamn Trevor. My point is, it wasn’t unusual that Hardy would keep standing bike known to man. He looked like a circus bear riding a there, after I told him to leave, or that he wasn’t talking. 50 51 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE LAST DAY ON EARTH

I figured he was waiting me out, staying nearby until my sand eyes I felt the mouth closing around me that’s when mood shifted. I knew who it was of course of course of course The light was dying, and the streetlights were com- ing on. Hardy shifted, rolling backward a little, until he * * * was backlit against the orange glare, just a dark silhou- ette against the darkening sky. I looked away at my burn- I woke up. In my bed, in my room, in the dark. I used ing stash of candles, and when I looked back, somehow, I to keep a clock radio on all night, tuned to some talk ra- knew the silhouette wasn’t him any more. dio channel, so low I could barely hear it. The sound of “Tell her,” the shadow said. voices made me feel watched over, un-alone, so I could fall It was Hardy’s outline, his size, his posture even, but asleep. That was how I soothed myself, in those days; with its voice wasn’t human. It sounded like cold metal that the sound of people going about their business without rips your tongue off when you lick it. It sounded like time me, the planet’s constant spinning. slowing down. It sounded like everything at once breaking. I rolled over, and the clock radio glared red at me: “Tell her you let it in,” said the shadow. “Tell her.” 12:01 AM. I listened for the midnight radio, all those low Something was moving in Jenny’s house. I didn’t have voices talking about street construction and stocks and to look to know — something is in Jenny’s house, something bad tariffs. There was nothing. All through that black night, I is in there, it’s moving — but when I looked away from the lay there and heard nothing: The hum of silence and dark- shadow, into her windows, I caught glimpses. Big, lurch- ness, the sound of a world that was no longer there. ing in the dark, something impossible, legs and mouths splintering off from each other in non-real numbers, at an- gles that didn’t exist. I wanted to know what it was. I leaned toward the bad thing. I stared. “Tell her you let it in and everything will change,” the shape promised, in its voice like time. I knew it now. The thing moving through Jenny’s house was known to me. If I could just see it clearly I would be sure, I would remember its name. I knew its name. Just lean in far enough, lean into the window, see it, let it see me, if I just let it touch me a little I would know, I needed to see it so badly, let it in let it in let it in, it told me, looping end- lessly through the dark, and I leaned so far into its thou-

52 53 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY

CHAPTER ONE Part Two Jenny

The morning the world ended was beautiful. Dave had dropped me off halfway around the block, so I wouldn’t The Day get yelled at. I watched his dinged-up, dusty blue car dis- appear down the road. The mist was still lifting and the sun was pale white, just beginning to yellow, like the yolk leaking into the white of an egg. I thought about Easter, the World Went for some reason, hunting for eggs in a frilly dress not warm enough to keep me from shivering. I thought about spring. I walked around the corner and down our street, mist collecting into rivulets on my arms, looking up at the sky. If Away I’d looked at the ground, or anywhere around me, I would have seen the problem. Instead, I saw Nick. “Something is wrong,” he said. Nick was sitting on his stoop, his elbows on his knees, staring at me. His eyes looked hollow, and this time, it wasn’t Halloween makeup.1 He looked like he’d been up all night. “Did something happen to you last night?” Nick said. I looked away from him, hoping I could disengage through sheer force of body language. 1 You heard the woman. Gently erase my eyeliner from your mental image, Reader. Give me back my dignity. Though, who am I kidding, now that I’ve brought it up, you’ll never be able to let it go. — Nick 55 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY

“Dave and I went out. It’s personal,” I said. “I need Why was it still so cold? to get back in there before my mom realizes I spent the Nick picked himself up and came striding toward me night.” across the lawn, his giant boots clomping as he went. “You’re incredibly bad at sneaking,” he said. “It’s ten “It was the portent of Change,” Nick said. “The third AM, Jenny. She’s at work.” sign. You saw the swarm — the birds. You saw vermin — It was true. My mom had about a dozen jobs, keeping the ants.” the two of us afloat. This was the weekend she waitressed “I saw a few hundred ants,” I said. at Bob Evans. Still, if that were all, I would have kept walk- Nick pointed, mutely, at the ground below us. I don’t ing. I stopped because of Nick’s voice. There was a shiver blame him for not warning me. There weren’t any good in it; a lost sound I’d never heard before. words for it. I blame myself for looking. “I had a dream last night,” Nick said, in his new voice. The blacktop of the street was no longer blacktop. It “I had a really bad dream. Something was in your house. swarmed and bubbled, one long, thick living thing, each Did you dream that, Jenny?” of its hundred thousand million antennae twitching. The I hadn’t. But I had dreamed. I was watching Nick from fuzzy, twitching river of ants overflowed and sent tendrils across the street and darkness came from beneath and be- across the lawns. Seeing it made me itch all over. I reached hind him. He was sitting in front of the dark, like a beach- up to scratch my arm, and that’s when I saw: There were goer with his back turned to the sea, while the wave rose. twenty or thirty of them already. Hundreds more were It was the size of cities. Everything around Nick was get- climbing my skirt, my shirt, absorbing me into the swarm. ting darker, he was too small to be lost so far back in the Nick yanked me toward his front door and inside. I dark, and next to me, someone said don’t feel sorry for him, heard myself screaming. I couldn’t remember starting, but he let it in. If I could turn my head I’d see who was talking, I didn’t think I could stop. They were on me, and no mat- it was a voice I knew. I kept trying to turn my head, to see ter how hard I brushed myself off — and I kept brushing who was sitting next to me, and they spoke in a sweet ter- myself off, kept having to put my hands on them — I knew rible voice until morning. I would never get all of them off. Nick shook me, like you “It was just a dream,” I said. do to someone in a movie when they’re being hysterical. A trickle of fog rolled down the back of my neck. My I’m being hysterical, I realized, dimly. This is hysterical, scream- spine lit up with a shiver. Nick was tugging at my arm, ing and not stopping. I could see him looking at his hand, harder and harder, like he was trying to pull me right off wondering if he was supposed to slap me. I clamped my the pavement, but I couldn’t stop thinking about that chill mouth shut. in the air. It was mid-morning, and it was almost June. “What,” I said.

56 57 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY

This felt insufficient, so I rooted around in my brain for wanted was for Nick to get some normal hobbies. I stuck more. Eventually, I came up with: “What?” the Xeroxed sheet in my desk drawer with a bunch of old I’d said it louder, that time, so I felt it counted for more. term papers and craft projects and moved on. “It was a mistake,” Nick said. “It was just a bad mis- I should have read it. I should have looked. I should take, Jenny. I’m sorry, I’m really sorry, but you have to be- have realized that whatever was building in Nick that lieve me.” semester was dangerous, desperate, that his normal sugar He was starting to sound hysterical himself. high vibe was drifting toward something more like mania “What. Did you do,” I said, kludging together a sen- — the kind of mood where you max out your credit cards tence on sheer willpower. in Vegas, leave your wife for the singer of a ukulele folk “The ritual for Omphagor,” Nick said. “It does some- band, get a tattoo of Rainier Wolfcastle on your face, end thing different than what I said.” the world for fun. Because now, here he was, pleading with me, voice shaking, huge brown eyes on the edge of tears. * * * Saying I messed up, I messed up, it was a mistake, believe me, in a way that no-one who’s made an actual mistake ever really Beeing the Queer and Pleafaunt Summoning of a Demon, the does. manuscript had read, in large embellished letters. It was “Just tell me what you did,” I said. some old library book Nick had dug up — or, more spe- “Omphagor grants wishes,” Nick said, “like I told you. cifically, a bad Xerox of that book, which he’d made in the But you have to ask face to face. The demon shows up.” copy center, since they wouldn’t let him check it out. He “Right,” I said. “It’s a summoning. You said that.” wasn’t even really supposed to copy it. The book was old. “I didn’t tell you how,” Nick said. “Omphagor needs a It didn’t look like anything much to me, just more crazy body. It3 needs someone’s body. It’s not a wish-granting rit- Nick stuff. I spent more time trying to figure out what a ual, Jenny. Not mainly. It’s a ritual for possession.” “pleafaunt” was than I did reading the page itself. Some Possession. Little girls with backs arched at painful an- kind of chicken, maybe.2 It grants wishes, Nick insisted. Look: gles, projectile vomit, crucifixes with sharp edges inside “Good health of the body,” wealth, fame. You trap a demon on the 3 Yes, “it.” Demons don’t have genders — not in the fun, my- mortal plane and make it give you whatever you want. What I non-binary-friend-Alix way, but in the terrifying, force-beyond-hu- 2 Just means “pleasant.” It’s an old-timey typography problem; man-comprehension way. Think for a second: Electricity doesn’t there was no standardized spelling before dictionaries, and their low- have a gender, but it can move your body around against your will. ercase “s” looks like an “f” to us now. You’re probably expecting me to Cancer doesn’t have a gender, but it’s alive, it changes you, and it add that “queer” doesn’t mean what you think it means, or that there kills you. A demon isn’t a person. It’s a raw current, a deadly conta- are no bees involved, but I won’t. You’ll just have to find out. — Nick gion; it’s cancer that can think. —Nick. 58 59 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY you. Fairuza Balk in The Craft, when she puts Manon’s ing, scabbed, multi-headed things. Brown roaches seethed spirit inside her, yelling he’s in me he’s in me and murder- in the mangy gaps of their fur and poured off around them, ing everyone because he gave her sharks. A dozen images the size of a child’s palm or a peanut butter cup, glossy rained through me, all of them a little stupid, a little ridic- brown and twitching. ulous, all of them horrible, and I clutched my arms, hold- Nick lunged in the direction of his basement bedroom, ing my only precious skin, because Nick had tried to take working on old instincts. But insects come from below. it. He’d made me do that ritual over a dozen times, know- Rats do, too. We hovered, for a second, at the top of the ing that if it worked, something might take my body away. basement stairway, looking down at it: The heaving mess “You didn’t tell me,” I said. “How could you do that and of chitin and legs and twitching antennae, the Vermin Tide not tell me?” coming to drown his house. “You wouldn’t have believed me,” Nick said. “It didn’t There was no time to scream or lose my mind, and I matter. It was crazy to think it mattered. That’s what you knew that, even as I also knew they had reached the door said. Right, Jenny?” and at least one or two big roaches were crawling on my This time I actually thought he might cry. Or throw up; hand. I grabbed Nick by the back of his ancient t-shirt and he was looking pretty grey. Serves you right, I was thinking. hauled him back through his living room and up his own But I didn’t get time to be petty, and since this is all sup- stairs, toward what passed for higher ground. posed to be educational, this is one thing I will tell you: I could feel things crunching below my feet as I ran. The When something called the Vermin Tide is approaching bottoms of my shoes got sticky, and then slippery, with your house, you don’t want to stand still and have a heart- that yellowy pus bugs use for guts. A rat got under my to-heart with your fellow sorcerer next to the heating vent. skirt and bit me, right above my Achilles tendon, taking Or any vent, really. a big chunk of me away with him. I screamed, I slipped; I would have fallen, right into all those other mouths wait- * * * ing for me on the floor below. Nick threw one arm back to steady me, so I lived. Maybe at one point the roaches had been coming My body kept going through no means I could under- through one by one, leaking into the room slowly, but stand, just the need to survive kicking in. My brain thought when we saw them, the rats came with them, a wave of rabies, rabies. I kept moving, propelled along by my body, as matted gray fur and yellowed teeth breaking the vent cov- if it were a car someone else was driving, and as I start- er off its hinges and pouring toward us. The rats were as ed panicking about hydrophobia and muscle spasms, we long as my forearm, some knotted together into pus-seep- made it to the top of the stairs.

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“My books,” Nick said, trying to pull away from me. way along the banister, a glossy blackish vine reaching up “My books are all in the basement. I can’t do anything from below. As I looked, the biggest rat rose up, twitching without them.” half-cockroach still in its teeth, and looked up the stairs. I “It isn’t possession,” I said. swear to God, it looked right at me. It was amazing, how my body could keep talking when “Whoever Omphagor is, it’s been here for a while now,” I wasn’t in it. I was floating two feet to the side of myself, Nick said. “Maybe since we did the first ritual. I don’t numb, stunned, looking in on what my life had become. know. But it’s over now. Omphagor got what it wanted. “Possession is cussing and peeing on the carpet,” I said. The world is ending. We’re done.” “This is something else. What else does your ritual do, As he said it, he took my hand. Nick?” The rats would be coming soon. I realized how useless It was the way he looked at me, just then. Sadly, as if it was, running from the one that bit me. I would have he were sorry for me. That’s when I knew we were going been better off letting go, falling into them right away, let- to die. ting the tide take me. I wouldn’t get rabies. I wouldn’t live “Omphagor shows up,” Nick said. “Like I told you. To long enough. I would just die, and by the time I died, I ‘walk the earth and taste its pleasures.’ But after a while, knew I would think death had taken too long. it gets sick of walking and tasting.” I held Nick’s hand, because he was going to die too, and “So the demon leaves?” I said. “That’s good. That’s I couldn’t feel anything but sorrow for that, even though what we want.” he’d killed me. His hot, sandpapery palm scraped against “It doesn’t leave anything behind,” Nick said. “Think of mine. I could almost be okay, I thought, knowing we’d be it this way. You like candy, right?” together through the end. Then Nick heard the tangle of I couldn’t believe he was going to spend the last few metal hitting pavement, and he was running away from minutes of our lives posing clever rhetorical questions. I me, down the stairs, heading off somewhere to die alone. stared at him, with the face of someone who did not like candy, until he kept talking. “This place, our world,” Nick said, “it’s not the candy. It’s the wrapper. Omphagor takes what we have to give, the good things, and it enjoys them. But when it’s done, the wrapper goes in the trash.” I could see the rats milling around at the bottom of the stairs, thick as carpet. A stream of roaches was making its

62 63 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY

— INTERLUDE — CHAPTER TWO Beeing the Queer NICK and Pleafaunt Summoning of a Demon I was moving before I knew what I’d heard; metal on For that these be hard times for men of easy virtue; concrete, rats squealing, a boy’s scream. Hardy, and that For that the Church hath forbade our assembly and goddamn bike he’d never learned to ride, rolling through pleasant visits, and such gaieties as dancing, and the taste the apocalypse like it was any Saturday morning. of wine; For that if joy be forbade by law, only outlaws shall ever Jenny pounded down the stairs after me. She threw her be joyful; arm out in front of me, trying to hold me back. For these reasons, we entice thee to speak the name “They’ll kill you,” she said. of OMPHAGOR, that General whose forces surpass any “They’ll kill Hardy,” I said. “Move.” earthly King, lord of earthly virtues and pleasures, OM- I was furious with her, but somehow, that’s what PHAGOR who gives each man fame, good health of body, brought me back. A few seconds ago, death had been in- the wealth of coin, the conquest of those as he desires, evitable; now, we were bargaining with it, trying to plan and etc. how and when it would happen. That bargaining is what For this bounty OMPHAGOR, our lord, desires nothing being normal feels like. Death is inevitable every moment but walking the Earth and tasting its Pleasure, and to do of your life. You just find a way to tell yourself that you’re with that earth as OMPHAGOR wishes — as you may wish in control. who see it so void and barren of Delight. “Hardy can take care of himself,” Jenny said, even If you be He who hath been denied your Earthly Tithe though she, of all people, knew that Hardy couldn’t. “He of Joy, we entice you, join hand with Friend, and invite steered right into that swarm. This is his problem. Let him OMPHAGOR who is Remedy to all Pain to join your gath- solve it.” ering. I heard Hardy scream, his voice ratcheting up another For there is no thing to lose but this world we have, and octave. what good, friend, is that world to us? “He is solving it,” I said. “He’s screaming for help. Let’s help him.”

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“What if we can’t?” Jenny said. “What if we die trying? blue and white, not that it exists any more — and I hoped You’re being codependent.” no-one was home. They had a baby. It sounded like something she’d heard from someone Hardy was under the receding mass, and, anti-climac- else. The Oprah-y clunk of it, don’t be so codependent about tically, he still had a face. The rest of him was a mess. the apocalypse, made me want to laugh at her, or throttle Ragged chunks had been torn out all down his forearms, her. I had no time for either. Every second I spent trying where he’d crossed his arms over his face to defend him- to get past her was a lost eye, a lost lip, a rat tunneling self. It looked like when my mom shredded pork for taco through belly fat to gut. I just ducked her arm and kept night. It was carnage. Jenny sucked a breath in at the sight. moving. “My mouth tastes like bugs,” said Hardy. She trailed after me — slowly, and holding her breath, I helped him up, trying to get as little of his taco meat but she did it, because her other option was being alone. on me as possible. Jenny looked off, down the block, at the Who’s codependent now, I thought, as I did what she and I receding waves. both knew would kill me. “Is it over?” she said. “Are we alive?” I said. * * * “Yes.” “Then it’s not over,” I said. “Omphagor is a General of Hardy was alive, anyway. Or something was, under- Hell who’s been lying in wait for all eternity. It’s not going neath the blanket of rats. I could see him rolling, fighting to scare us with bugs and then go away.” them off, which meant he probably had all of his major Jenny’s face pinched and hardened; she sucked her lips pieces attached. Soft tissue, eyes, tongue, that would all in between her teeth until I could see what she’d look like be sort of a reveal, I figured, and I braced myself for it. at eighty. Not that she’d live to eighty. Not that I would. Thinking about what the rats had already done to Hardy’s “You don’t have to talk to me like that,” she said. “I face meant I wasn’t thinking about what they would do to went along with your plan.” mine. “Yes, Jenny, congratulations,” I said. “You did the de- I charged out there, and Jenny charged after me, with cent thing in a life-or-death situation. It must have been much less conviction, and as we did, the rats sort of… scat- hard for you. You’re one of our great American heroes, tered. I don’t mean to be anti-climactic. The wave moved really.” on from us, down the street. I could see a flow of rats “I risked my life,” she said, starting to shout. “I let you heading through the ground-floor window of the house risk your life, because you wouldn’t let me save it.” next door from mine — such a nice-looking house, pale “It’s my life, Jenny!”

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“And mine is… what? The DVD extra to yours?” Jenny was the one fact I had managed to retain about the spe- said. “You know, at least I think about your life. I think cies. All my tools — the cheap New Age paperbacks, the about your safety. I ask myself if any of my hobbies might battered Crowley, the $19.99 Ren Fest athame; everything accidentally murder you, and then, I don’t murder you.” that made me a sorcerer and not a victim — were gone, “I wish you would, sometimes, Jenny,” I said, letting eaten or fouled or just swept out of reach. the momentum of the fight sweep me straight from Mor- We were stuck there, in Jenny’s chintzy floral-print liv- al High Ground to the deadly Threatening-Death-Just-To- ing room, waiting for the sky to cave in. There was a First Score-Points Swamp.4 “I really do. I would welcome death Aid kit for Hardy under the kitchen sink, at least. There at this point.” were bandages. He barely flinched as I poured disinfectant “Yes, you would,” Jenny said, “but you didn’t think on his ruined arms, though it made me want to throw up about whether anyone else would, and that’s how you just seeing it. I don’t think Hardy was a very manly per- ended the world.” son, in most respects, but he had one thing down. He was “Did Jenny not want to come out here?” Hardy said, stoic. I stayed quiet, winding the bandages over his wounds. mildly. Jenny, still mad that I’d made her be heroic, was curled I had honestly forgotten he was still there. Jenny had up on her couch, propping her arms on the back of it so too, clearly. I watched all sense of righteousness drain she could look out her big front window. from her face, and I grinned, which was the wrong move, “Where are yours?” Jenny said. because my turn was next. “What?” “How did Nick end the world?” said Hardy. “Your parents,” she said. “My mom’s at work, but where are your mom and dad? Did they die?” * * * My mom. I kept trying and failing not to think of her. She was a receptionist named Gloria, and she was what other We wound up in Jenny’s living room. Through its front people referred to as “a real fun lady,” and as far as she was window, I could see the wreck of the place I grew up; win- concerned, I had never done anything wrong in my life. dows caved in and shattered, door busted off its hinges, a Not the weird clothes, not the bad metal bands, not being hole in one outer wall where the pipes had collapsed out- unpopular or worshiping Satan or growing penicillin on a ward. Whatever was in there was covered in bug guts and pile of old underwear in our basement, none of it. My Dad rat shit and probably dead rats, too; they ate each other, was a dad; he went in and out, he said stern things about 4 A destination he visited in every serious argument, no mat- report cards, he failed to play catch. My mother, though. ter what it was about, and sometimes, terrifyingly, while driving. She adored me. I sat in Jenny’s living room, wrapping ban- — Jenny 68 69 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY dages, and wondered how quickly that would change. Jenny shot a glare like the storm clouds at me, hot and “Doctor’s appointment,” I said. “I figured I’d just let ugly. I braced myself for the second round to commence. them go. Where could they be that’s safer than a hospital, “The world was already ending,” Hardy said. right?” He pulled back from me as I finished taping off the ban- Jenny didn’t turn back to look at me. I squinted, trying dages, flexing his arms to test them. Specks of blood and to see her reflection in the glass. I knew it was desperate, ooze came through the gauze almost right away, but — but I couldn’t help it. I had to know what she thought of considering how gnarly the underlying damage was — it me. was less than you’d think. “There’s a storm,” she said. “I don’t think you understand what’s going on here,” I I had seen it, too — big, curdling, roiling clouds, closer said. to the ground than any I had ever seen before. They were This was true. I didn’t. I mean, we’d explained it all, in strangely shaped, lit from inside by veins of orange light. detail, and several times, but I barely understood it myself. Something that wasn’t lightning flickered through them, “I understand the end of the world,” Hardy said. orange and red. What he said next was the longest I’d ever heard him “It could be Y2K, right?” Jenny said. “The world was talk uninterrupted. It was also the strangest thing I’d ever supposed to end this year, anyway. Maybe there aren’t heard him say. I’m trying to remember; he started off with even any demons. This could be what Y2K looks like.” a list of movies. Or, no, it was the singles of the year, or it “Y2K isn’t until New Year’s,” I said. was Clinton — no. Fuck it. I’ll get Hardy to tell you him- “Shut up.” self. She still hadn’t turned around. I looked past her, out the window. The storm moved over the world fast, blot- ting out the sun, until the whole sky was one great flame. I wondered if I was going to cry. I decided against it. The end of the world was bad enough without me crying because my grade school friend was mean to me. Someone had to be the grown-up around here, and given who I was working with, it looked like I was going to be stuck with the job. “Don’t say things you’ll regret, Jennifer,” I said. “The world is ending. We won’t get to talk much longer.”

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— INTERLUDE — ica in 1999 was a culture already in swift and irreversible decline. Its every development pointed to the darker world 1999: An Apocalypse In Context on the horizon. 1999’s most important news items were the Columbine shooting, in which two teenaged Nazi sym- pathizers killed 15 people including themselves, and the A brief sociocultural overview of Clinton impeachment, in which the sitting President’s sex- the apocalypse of 1999, taking into account ual misconduct with a much younger woman was uncov- its precedents, historical context, and ered by his political enemies and used to seek his remov- overall function al. 1999’s most important startups were Napster (which Lecturer: Hardy Anderson Patrick5 would functionally collapse the music industry), Amazon (which would collapse independent bookstores) and Pets The number one single on May 29, 1999 — the day the Dot Com (which sold pet food, a function soon taken over world ended — was “Livin’ La Vida Loca,” by Ricky Martin. by Amazon). 1999’s most important fashion statement was The number one movie at the box office was Star Wars: the cargo skirt. I could go on. The Phantom Menace. What I argue is that, even if Nicholas Casini and Jen- Other #1 movies of 1999 included: Entrapment, The nifer Long had never existed, or if they had done better Mummy, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, and things with their time in high school, the world would still Wild Wild West, this last regarded as the movie that broke have ended in 1999, or shortly thereafter; the world was the formerly unbreakable winning streak of its star, Will already ending, all around us, which (along with the fact Smith. Other #1 songs included Santana’s “Smooth” and that 1999’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture was the theme song to Wild Wild West, which Will Smith — American Beauty) produced our overwhelming genera- much to his own and others’ regret — performed. The win- tional malaise. ner for Best Rock Video at the MTV Music Video Awards To speak colloquially: Nothing that we were supposed that year was Korn’s “Freak on a Leash;” Korn shared the to look forward to happened. Everyone loved Star Wars, category with Kid Rock and Limp Bizkit, and were nomi- but then Star Wars was out and everyone hated it. The nated in the “Best New Artist” category. Kid Rock was in Internet was supposed to be Matthew Lillard hacking and that one, too. going to raves, but then it was just a place to buy pet food. I submit these facts in advance of my conclusion: Amer- The President was supposed to be an old man on the TV who showed up and gave speeches and disappeared, but 5 I have no idea how Nick got Hardy to do this. He’s not an now, the President was on trial, and we knew what he liked easy guy to reach these days. But that’s the thing: As much as we to do during sex. hurt each other, as worn-out or angry as I sometimes got, Nick Cas- ini was magic. — Jenny Columbine was supposed to change everything. We 72 73 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY had to show people our bags at the school’s entrance CHAPTER THREE each morning, we had to follow a new dress code, we had to install metal detectors and do a dozen active shooter drills. The next month, a different kid with a different gun shot up a different school. None of it mattered. The world Jenny was just getting worse, and none of our plans to fix it ever seemed to work. It was the end of the century. It was the end of the mil- I mean, what was I supposed to do? What do you do, lennium. It was the end of high school. If it was the end when the single least articulate guy you know suddenly of our lives, what else was new? What were those lives delivers a lecture in your living room? going to be? Internet pet food purchases, presidential sex crimes, people complaining about Star Wars. The world Hardy’s speech hung in the air, making everything feel was already ending in 1999. The apocalypse was just a alien and disorienting. I watched the fire in the sky cast buzzer ringing, telling us that our time had run out. its shifting light on the tiny flowers in my mom’s wallpa- per, saw the hulk of Hardy barely wedged into a wooden rocker in the corner. This looked like a house that only women lived in, I realized. Everything in it was pink or frilled or flower-printed. Nick, in his black outfit, looked like a bruise spreading on the carpet. I had lived here. I knew that, but I didn’t believe it. Sud- denly, my own house looked fake to me, like the inside of a dollhouse. It was ridiculous that such a place existed, and that I would pretend to be the girl who lived in this room. I had to get out. I stood up, breathing heavy, and ran up the stairs into my bedroom. I steadied myself against the sight of all my old detri- tus, all the selves I was outgrowing: My “I WANT TO BE- LIEVE” poster, the stack of MST3K episodes I’d taped off the Sci-Fi Channel last Thanksgiving, the From the Choirgirl Hotel tour program on my desk. Nick and I had camped out by the doors of the theater, trying to meet Tori, but even

74 75 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY though we showed up at ten in the morning, there were that sound like Hardy to you? Did it sound like anyone we too many people ahead of us. Nick promised that next time know?” we’d get there before dawn, like the real weirdos, the ones “So Omphagor is going to bore us to death with Tori gave extra tickets to and knew by name. Matthew Lillard references?” Nick said. “Seems like a long So I couldn’t be dying, because Tori was touring that game, but let’s see if it pays off.” fall, and Nick was going to drive me around for a week so “We’re the ones who summoned the demon,” I said. we could follow her like those people we read about on the “Why wouldn’t it infect somebody we know? Hardy Dent. The world couldn’t be ending, because that would showed up right when that swarm did. He steered into it. mean Tori Amos was ending, and I couldn’t be the reason The rats didn’t even hurt him.” Tori Amos died, or — worse — canceled her tour. For a “They hurt him, Jenny,” Nick said. “I touched it. It was minute, I could almost believe none of it was happening; gross.” the apocalypse was just a bad dream, one of a thousand I’d “It’s not Omphagor’s body,” I said. “It can probably had, and I felt safe. afford some superficial damage. I’m telling you —what Then Nick came pounding up the stairs and threw open Hardy did, out there, that’s what I’d do if I were the de- the door, before I was fully sane yet, and everything came mon. I would try to act helpless. Show up at the right mo- apart. ment and let you invite me in.” Nick sighed. He was looking down at the carpet be- * * * tween his boots. I couldn’t see his eyes. He scraped his hair back with one hand, rubbing his face, like a tired dad “What are you doing?” Nick said, standing in my open whose kid won’t stop begging for ice cream. doorway. “Hardy is hurt down there. He needs our help.” “Hardy’s not Leatherface, Jenny,” Nick said. “He’s just “It isn’t him,” I said. got some thing where he can’t read faces. His reactions It felt like a crazy thing to say, right up until I said it, look different than yours.” but then it was out of my mouth, and I was committed. I “I’ve seen Hardy before,” I said. “I’m telling you, I want pulled Nick in by one arm and shut the door, propping my- him out of my house.” self up against it in case of intrusion. Nick shot me a fed- “Of course you do,” Nick said. “It’s twice today you’ve up look, one eyebrow headed up toward his hairline, but suggested killing the guy to solve a problem. You didn’t he sat down patiently on the edge of my ratty lace-edged even think he was possessed the first time. You won’t rest comforter and let me explain. until I leave Hardy Patrick dead in a ditch.” “You said Omphagor could be in anyone,” I said. “Did It was so unfair. I had always helped Hardy — not the

76 77 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY way Nick did, by charging in and demanding things, but in person in there was someone I’d never seen before. Some- my way, when I could. I provided crucial distractions. Nick one awful.6 shook his head. His face was twisted into some shape I’d “Is this hard for you, Jenny?” the awful stranger said. “Is never seen on him before. it tough to be the only normal person you know? Trapped “It’s like you give it up for one guy and suddenly no-one in this house with the freaks and the demons and every- else matters to you,” he said. “I mean, at least it’s smarter one who’s just so much worse than you, does it scare you than your Y2K theory.” to be better than us all the fucking time?” I looked up at my Dragonriders of Pern books, which were Don’t listen, I thought. It only wants to hurt you. I pressed still racked up on my bookshelf. I had them all, in those myself up against the wall. The doorknob was a few inches elaborate ‘80s covers, with uniform spines — all except for from my hand, close enough that I thought I could grab it. The White Dragon. Its spine was a silver strip of duct tape, The thing that looked like Nick saw the fear on my face, with the title written in Sharpie. That’s what Nick did, the and it sneered. first afternoon he invited me to his house. He took the two “You do seem scared,” it said. “You seem like you’re halves of the book that the teacher had ripped apart, and not thinking straight. Because you’re trying to outrun a he taped them together. monster, and instead of actually running, Jenny, you locked Nick fixed my book. Nick gave me half of his sandwich yourself in the room with it. And then you pissed it off.” so I wouldn’t miss lunch. Nick, the real Nick, didn’t hurt He went for me, and I went for the door. I reached it me. So I knew it then, clearly and all of a sudden: The per- just before he did. Then I was off down the hall, my body son in front of me, the person who put me in danger and again working without me, getting me away from the room called me a bad person and made me feel stupid and tried where Nick wanted to kill me. I found the closest door to kill me, was not Nick any more. with a lock on it — the bathroom — and ducked behind “I don’t know you,” I said. it, slamming it shut. I tried to lean against it, but my foot “Jesus,” Nick said. “Whatever this is, you need to snap slipped on all the blood, and I landed on my hands and out of it. You sound like a crazy person.” knees, splashing in it. When I turned my head, I saw him. “I don’t,” I said. “You made us do the ritual. You weren’t scared when those birds crashed into the mall. You dragged us out into the swarm, like you knew that it couldn’t hurt 6 She’s clearly crazy, you’re thinking. I was just being sensitive. you. You let it in. Didn’t you? You wanted this.” I’ve been talking to you this whole time, telling you what I thought He snapped up to his feet then, faster than I’d ever seen and felt, so I couldn’t possibly be possessed. For that matter, neither one of us can be dead, because we’re still narrating the book. That’s him move. I knew I was right when I saw his eyes. The what you’re thinking. You’re wrong on both counts. — Nick 78 79 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY

CHAPTER FOUR broken. I banged on the door one more time, and Jenny stum- bled out. The whole left side of her skirt was bloody up to the waist, as if she’d been doused with it. Her hands NICK dripped with gore. So did her face, a little. She’d put one hand to her mouth, or something, and forgotten what was on there. It was smeared on her like a drunk girl’s lipstick. I heard screaming on the other side of the bathroom Her mouth was red, her hands were red, her clothes door, and I banged on it with both hands, shouting Jenny’s were red. Her eyes were red in a different way. She’d been name. in that room maybe two or three minutes, but she looked I knew I had scared her, back in her bedroom. It was just as if she’d been crying for hours. Jenny didn’t look like a a moment of pure meanness: I saw her round blue eyes little kid any more. She didn’t look soft. She looked dead, wide and wet beneath her glasses, her jaw dropped and vacant, like some vital part of her had been sucked out and trembling, and she looked like a child to me. She looked disposed of in a waste dump. eight years old, letting the whole world push her around “Get away from me,” she said, quietly. and call her names on the playground. It was infuriating. Then she was running down the hall, nearly knocking How many people got away with being that fragile? How me over as she went. I knew I should stop her, or at least fragile did I ever get to be? How sheltered, how selfish, some part of me did, but by then I had seen what was in how weak did you have to be, to actually cry over being the bathroom, and I couldn’t move. I heard a door slam asked to think about someone else for a change? downstairs. Jenny had run out into the storm. Jenny will I lunged for her, not even sure what I meant to do, and die out there, I thought. You can’t let Jenny die, you have to go then she was running out the door. Watching her go, I sud- get her. The thought didn’t connect with my body. I stood denly felt insane to myself. I stumbled after her, calling I’m there frozen. sorry, I’m sorry. She didn’t hear me. She ran from me like you’d run from the Devil, fast as you can and not looking * * * back. The screaming from the bathroom was terrible. We’d The blood was smeared on the walls, the floor, the ceil- both screamed a lot that day, myself to an un-manly ing. It was crusted thick around the rim of the toilet. It degree, but this sound was different. It was raw and ani- bubbled in the sink, where it overflowed around chunks of mal and it went on and on. It sounded like someone being something wet and tattered.

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I mistook the marks for spatter at first. There was a forever. I’d hear that demented supervillain giggle in my splash mark on the floor where it looked like Jenny had nightmares, proof of who I really was; I had killed some- fallen. She must have tried and failed to right herself, one, and then I had laughed about it, while his corpse was wound up sprawling in it. But the bloodstains didn’t look still steaming in front of me. I bit my own tongue, hard like spray. They were tracks: A thousand thousand tiny enough to draw tears and maybe blood. The giggle died in feet, wriggling up through the pipes. Fouling themselves. my chest. Crawling over everything. Then I turned around, at which point I almost died, too. I could move if I took it a step at a time, and so I did, A shape bigger than the doorway loomed into view, and I walking over the gory tile slowly and in silence. I could jumped out of my skin, barely missing the chance to fall, hardly feel my legs; I would have thought I was floating, if crack my head open on the sink and bleed out in the bath- not for the crunch of bug corpses under my feet. They had tub with my new friend Tim.7 crushed each other with the sheer weight of the massed “Jesus Christ, Hardy,” I said. tide, thousands upon millions, coming and coming. “Rats are dirty,” he said patiently. “I wanted to use the Coming for what, I thought. But I knew. I could already shower.” see that the window above the shower was cracked open “I don’t advise it,” I said. — just a bit, to let the steam out. That had been enough It was ultimately good that everyone I knew irritated to let the rats in. Blood slopped over the sill where they’d me. It gave me something to focus on. Repressing the urge fled the room, each carrying their piece of Timothy. to snap at Hardy, for instance, gave me control of my arms He was in the bathtub. Or some of him was; the least and legs, so that I was able to get out of that bathroom and edible bits, bone and meat that stuck close to it, a few high shut the door. bits of his lung still wedged in his rib cage. He’d ripped neatly apart when there was no more tissue to hold him * * * together. The front part pitched facelessly forward, one arm flung out over the edge of the tub. He must have tried My legs gave out as soon as Timothy was out of my to fight them off, or at least get out. sight. Hardy and I wound up sitting on Jenny’s stairs, There were a lot of rats. Wet bathtubs are slippery. So looking down at the front door. in the end, Timothy died as he lived: Not leaving Jenny’s “Why did she leave?” Hardy said. shower. “I don’t know, Hardy,” I said. “Because she thinks I could feel that I was going to laugh, actually heard it Yes, the “-othy” went missing. But then, so did the rest of starting, and I knew that if I let it out, I would hate myself 7 him. (What? It’s been years. Also, I hated that guy.) — Jenny. 82 83 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY this is all my fault.” full of quiet wisdom. He shifted beside me — a big, quiet, companionable “I still need to pee,” he said. presence, demanding nothing. You could say anything “You can pee in other people’s houses, Hardy,” I said. around Hardy, not least because you were never really sure “It’s not uncommon.” that he was listening. So it all spilled out. “I’ll keep that in mind,” he said. “It is my fault,” I said. “Jenny’s right. I should have I wanted to ask him why he thought it was more polite known this could happen. I did know. I just did it anyway. to shower, or whether he asked to use people’s showers I’m not normal.” every time he excused himself, or whether (this is where “You’re more normal than I am,” Hardy said. the conversation entered a weird territory for me) pee- Hardy was genuinely good company, was the thing. I ing for him somehow involved full nudity, which would wasn’t lugging him around like a suitcase, I didn’t hang make showering roughly equivalent in terms of social code with him out of obligation or pity. No-one ever let Hardy violations, but which made me really anxious about how be fragile, either; he’d had to eat shit every day of his life, many times he’d used the school bathroom and what hor- and eat it twice if he ever struck back or flew off the han- rors the other boys saw in there, and I knew he would have dle. I’d flown off pretty much every handle I ever had, at answered every one of those questions, truthfully, and in one point or another, but Hardy had a way of establishing the same pleasant tone. He was like a very polite anthro- a certain baseline calm. pologist doing field research on teenage customs. He had Also, it was nice to get a break from straight people. no idea what any of us were doing, let alone how to partic- Jenny, God love her, was just intensely heterosexual, but ipate, but he plugged away, determined to keep collecting Hardy — though you wouldn’t think it to look at him; data until he found out. most of the important things about Hardy were things you There was no more time for questions. The world was wouldn’t think to look at him, it turned out — was already dead, and so was Jenny Long, most likely, and if Hardy and sure he wanted to kiss boys. I weren’t dead yet, it was only because we were running “I messed up,” I said. “I do one thing, which is study behind schedule. What I decided, sitting on Jenny’s stairs, magic, and I still messed up. I killed people. I ended the was that I had to make it count. If I was already the man world.” I would be on the day I died, I had to make him someone “Everyone does bad stuff sometimes, Nick,” Hardy said. worth becoming. “Remember when I told you I wanted to use the shower? I stood up. I was lying. I wanted to pee.” “Where are you going?” Hardy asked. I looked up at him. He looked down at me, eyes “It’s my fault the world is ending,” I said. “So it’s my

84 85 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY job to save it. You can stay here if you want.” CHAPTER FIVE He shook his head and heaved his bulk up behind me. This had happened in every war, I suddenly realized; two guys standing up and heading out to die together. In trenches and jungles and Jenny Long’s living room, boys Jenny left shelter and headed out onto battle, most of them about our age. If this was being a man, it was terrible. Let My leg was ruined, but I ran on it anyway, hobbling and it come. I moved, he moved, two young soldiers, down the bleeding my way down the street as fast as I could. Tears stairs and out into a world on fire. blurred my vision, and so did speed, and that was good, because anything I did manage to see of the world was horrible. Fires raged in houses where rats had chewed through the wiring. Most of the windows had been broken; I saw chairs and tables resting on lawns in pools of shattered glass, where people had thrown them or beaten them through the windowpanes, trying to create a means of exit. I don’t think it worked. One man hung by the waist outside of his big bay window, stomach impaled on a shard of glass as long as my arm. Bits of him slopped down the siding. The street was crowded with stopped cars — not all of them crashed, although some were. I tried not to look inside those. I saw clouds of blood, hair, skin, in configu- rations I knew would make me vomit. What I hadn’t seen, I couldn’t remember, so I ran. That awful, smoking sky hung over all of it, covering Darbyton in its shifting shad- ows, turning the whole world red. I didn’t know where I was running to; west, vaguely, because west was good and good was west and I wanted to head toward a good part of the world. I was running just to

86 87 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY run, to get away from the mess that used to be Timothy and just walked in, and I wasn’t sure what to do. It was like the thing inside Nick that wanted to kill me. I kept moving seeing the T-Rex in Jurassic Park weeping into its little claw until my breath gave out and my ribs felt like splintered hands. You felt bad, but you also knew that if you moved, it wood piercing my gut, and then I stopped, hands on my would eat you. She eventually saw me anyway, in the back knees, trying to keep breathing while I sobbed. of her reflection, and snapped her head around. I braced When I looked up, I saw Debra lying on her lawn. She for her teeth to close around me. was breathing, too. “What are you waiting for?” she snapped. “Did you just come to look?” * * * I shook my head. “It could happen to you, too, you know,” she said. “They What else can I tell you about Debra McAllister? I saw won’t believe you, either.” her cry once. It was in freshman year, and it was messy. I had a little pack of Kleenex in my backpack; I cried There were rumors about something that had happened a lot in bathrooms, in those days, so I came prepared. I to her — she’d gone to a party, with the West kids, and if moved across the tile floor to Debra, and I handed the pack you heard one side of the story, she got really drunk and to her — the whole thing, because if I tried to dry her eyes embarrassed herself, and if you heard another side of the or touch her face, she was still Debra enough to smack story, something much worse happened, and she was not me. Don’t get me wrong: I couldn’t stand her. But I also the one who should have been ashamed. I knew who to couldn’t stand the idea of myself as someone who didn’t believe. I saw her crying. care when bad things happened to other girls. Debra was almost one of us. That was the thing. She She took the Kleenex and dried her eyes with it. Some- lived just west of our bad neighborhood — better off than how, it seemed to draw her back to herself. She took a Nick and me, but not so much better that it would mat- shaky breath and hardened her face against the world ter to the kids with three kitchens. She wasn’t rich, she again, becoming beautiful and shiny and mean. But when just found a way to look rich by being meaner to the poor she looked down at me, I saw something spark in her eyes, kids than anyone else. Before Debra proved her value as a a little flash of humanity I knew she would eventually hate bully, she was just another white-trash kid to mess with, a me for seeing. slightly better-dressed Courtney Scheiber. She was some- “Jesus will reward you,” Debra said. “That which you do thing fun to do. to the least of these. He rewards you if you help people.” So Debra was leaning on the sink in the girls’ bath- I guess that’s one more thing I can tell you about Deb- room, next to the auditorium, crying her eyes out. I had ra. She was super Christian. You could tell, because she

88 89 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY was a terrible bully that made everyone feel like crap all on you. the time. Nick always made fun of it, the Debra-and-Jesus She didn’t look hurt, I thought. But she didn’t look thing, but I hope it was real. I hope it helped her. It would okay, either. Who just lies down on their lawn and takes a make me feel better to think she had some comfort at the nap, fully dressed? Who can sleep through the end of the end. world? I decided not to solve the mystery. I wasn’t Agent Scul- * * * ly, I was a high school graduate who had accidentally killed her mother’s boyfriend. I probably shouldn’t operate on What I first thought, seeing Debra there on the lawn, the assumption that I was smart. I kneeled over Debra, was that it had happened again — another attack, anoth- shaking her by the shoulder. Bits of her body glitter came er bad party. The lawn behind her was strewn with red off and stuck to my palm. Solo cups and random sports equipment — bats, croquet “Are you all right?” I said. “Debra. Can you tell me if mallets, and for reasons I’ll never know, a bowling ball — you’re all right?” and a banner that read “GLADIATORS OF ’99” was strung Debra opened her eyes and wrapped both hands around along her front porch. Further back on the lawn, Billy and my throat. Chris were slumped on matching deck chairs. I couldn’t see their faces, but Chris was breathing; his gut slowly * * * rose and fell as I watched. Debra was curled up in fetal position on the grass, with She wasn’t looking at me, was the thing. She had moved her eyes closed, still wearing party clothes — a pink hal- up from the ground as if someone was dragging her by the ter top and jeans with little rhinestones sewn along the hair, disjointed and strangely, like a puppet with an in- seams. Her hair was twisted up in a million barrettes, one experienced puppeteer. Her head dangled from her neck, of those styles that would look ridiculous if I showed you keeling off to the side. Her eyes were glazed, unseeing, like a photo now, but which made me incredibly jealous at the a sleepwalker’s. time. I didn’t know how she got it to look so good, and I could feel some important piece of cartilage being com- I also didn’t know how she had the time to do it. It took pressed, squishing painfully up and back into my neck, to- hours. Her breathing was slow and even, and her face was ward my spine. I knew I was losing air, could hear the gag peaceful, with all of the tension of her cruelty gone. She and cluck as I tried to suck a breath in. Maybe I was losing looked sweet, the way babies look when they’re sleeping, blood flow too. The world was getting darker. before they wake up and start screaming and throwing up “Wake up,” I mouthed, before realizing that I couldn’t

90 91 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY talk. My voice box was being crushed along with every- but I heard something crack, and when I opened them, she thing else. wasn’t moving. I didn’t want to hear my own voice that way again, a You want me to tell you how horrible it was, how I felt gurgle coming through wet flesh. I couldn’t afford the air it sick or frightened or sorry. I can’t. Seeing Timothy in that lost me. So I stayed silent, not even screaming, as Debra’s shower had shifted something. It was so hideous, so un- head lolled toward me and her teeth started clicking to- like anything I had ever seen, and even as I was screaming gether. Oh, my God, her teeth. She moved toward me, mouth my throat raw, I knew I wasn’t screaming for him. I was chewing fast on nothing, and I closed my eyes, waiting to mourning some soft, innocent spot in my brain that had be shoved through the wood chipper of her face. Debra been burnt out, the end of the Jenny who had never seen was going to flay the face off my skull, because I’d tried to a dead body. That was over. I had already seen the worst see if she was okay, and I knew, in that moment, that Jesus thing I was ever going to see. I would never be that scared did not reward the helpers. again. I heard a thud, and an angry, female grunt, and sudden- So here we were. Debra McAllister was dead, but I was ly Debra’s hands were off me, and I could breathe. I turned alive, and her boyfriends were trying to kill me. I brought and ran, not even looking to see what saved me, and ran up one foot and stomped, hard, into Chris’s groin, kick- straight into Chris. ing him hard enough that my leg straightened. He let go He was awake, too — or moving, anyway, with that of my wrists, and the momentum knocked me backward, same vacant tilt of the head, the same fixed glare into the into Billy, who stumbled away from me and nearly lost his middle distance. He was a big guy, with a lot of muscle; balance. I did, too; I wound up on the ground, breathing running into his chest was like falling onto a gym mat. It hard, looking at a baseball bat that was just within arm’s bounced you back a little. He grabbed both my wrists in reach. Before either boy could grab me again, I had the bat one hand and leaned toward my face, toothy and drooling. in my hands. I yanked away from him, backward, and ran backward into I wasn’t sure how to swing, but my body taught me. I Billy, who was standing right behind me. wrapped both hands around it and brought it hard and hor- I heard the roar of my name, in a voice I knew. I twisted izontal into Billy’s skull first. One, two. The first cracked, my head around, past Billy, and saw Dave, who was kneel- the second squished. He went down on his knees, bleeding ing on top of Debra, pounding her head into the dirt. Too from his head, and I raised the bat high in both hands, like fast for me to protest, or even realize what I was seeing, I was staking a vampire. I brought it down. He went down he lifted his foot over her head and — fast, decisive, like on his belly. I brought it down, and down, and down, until crushing a cockroach — brought it down. I closed my eyes, he stopped moving.

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It was a haze, a drug, a trance. I had to live, and he had over. I had been quiet for a long time. to die. I didn’t think about anything else until it was over. I “Are you going to be okay?” Dave asked, eventually. don’t know that I would call what I was doing “thinking.” “I’m fine. I’m a little shaken up. I’m fine,” I said, twist- It was like sex,8 or popping a pimple. I just had to finish.9 ing my bloody hands in my lap. The second I was done, I didn’t know what was wrong Dave nodded and looked at the road. with me. I couldn’t understand it — how murder had felt I was not fine. The sidewalk was littered with people almost like joy. like Debra — alive but unmoving. It was difficult to tell I looked up and saw Chris looking at his dead friend. them apart from the dead. An ice cream truck had run Actually looking; his eyes were connecting, he knew what aground. Its sleeping driver was keeling out the window; he saw. He looked up at me, and I swear he was starting to the kid he’d run over was popped open under his tires. A cry. I saw Dave approaching from behind him. car had smashed neatly into the wall of one house. One “Wait,” I said, but I said it too slowly. Dave wrapped person was a bloody splatter over the windshield. Another, his hands around Chris’s skull and yanked it at the wrong a woman, was curled up a few feet away from her opened angle. His neck snapped. car door. Maybe she’d been thrown clear. Maybe she was It wasn’t like the movies. Even with your neck snapped, trying to run when it hit her. you take a while to die. There’s twitching.10 Some of the not-corpses twitched as we drove by. Wak- ing, or dying, I couldn’t tell; those things looked alike, too. * * * “Torpor and confusion,” I muttered to myself. “Plea- sures of the flesh. Sea of blood.” “Thank God I was there to save you,” Dave said. Dave shot a look over at me, clearly wondering just how I was in the passenger seat of his blue Volvo, looking freaked out I was, and if it was the kind that required med- through the window at the ruined world. Dave had been ical attention. driving us in circles, swerving around the twisted wrecks “I have something to tell you,” I said. “It’s going to that cluttered the blacktop. It was, he’d said, even worse sound really crazy.” on the highway; he’d been barricaded out of the city by the “I don’t think anything would sound really crazy at this sheer impassable sea of wreckage, which was why he was point,” Dave said. still driving around nearby when Debra attacked me. I peeled a rainbow teddy bear decal from Dave’s win- He’d said that, and the “thank God” thing, several times dow. This car had been his brother’s, once. It had all sorts 8 ?????!!!?!? — Nick of stickers for bands he hated: Phish, the Grateful Dead, 9 !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! - Nick even a Dave Matthews logo somewhere in back. He could 10 : ( - Nick 94 95 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY never get them off, so he tried to play it as ironic. It was vegetables and keep baseball bats to fight off the zombies. Dave’s one big weakness, and it made me feel so tender We’d survive. toward him: As cool as he was, he was stuck trying to “I didn’t tell you the worst of it,” I said, suddenly sure make the best of some stoner’s car. he could comfort me. “The demon possessed someone. I “You know my friend?” I said. “The one you don’t get think it picked my friend.” along with?” “You mean [GRISTLE OF CHRIS’S NECK SNAPPING] “[CRACK AND OOZE OF BILLY’S SKULL],” Dave is possessed?” Dave said. “Like, head-twisting, vomit-can- said, nodding. “Sure.” non, Exorcist possessed?” I winced, and hoped Dave wouldn’t notice. I nodded, waiting for him to laugh at me. “We summoned a demon,” I said. “A real one. It’s going “That makes so much sense,” Dave said. “I mean, I to end the world.” know she was important to you growing up and all, but I Dave looked over at me, his bangs flopping into his always got a bad vibe. That possessiveness toward you… eyes. I thought he would shout or cry, freak out, the way it was so intense.” Nick and I had done, but he just looked mildly concerned. I looked out Dave’s sticker-marred window and thought It was like I told him someone had keyed his car. I guessed of Josh Weir. He and I had been in eighth-grade choir to- that was being a grown man; hearing the worst and not gether. I loved choir; I loved the idea that I could open my really flinching. mouth and something worth hearing might come out. I “So you see,” I said. “You didn’t save me, after all. You loved Josh, too, because he could play piano and quote can’t save anyone. Not any more.” Monty Python and I could tell he was the only person “We’re still driving,” Dave said. “It’s a bad storm. But there who cared half as much as I did. So I slipped him a storms pass. There’s always a post-apocalypse.” note, before fall rehearsal. He read it aloud to his entire Just like that, as he said it, I realized there always was. section when he thought I couldn’t hear him. I don’t know Dave was smarter than me,11 so if Dave believed there was if you’ve heard a choir do “Wind Beneath My Wings,” but a future, there probably was one. Not a good one, maybe, it’s not traditional for the arrangement to include loud but a livable outcome. We’d find old soup cans and grow sobbing. 11 Dave was forty-seven, worked at a Virgin Megastore, and Nick spent the rest of that year demolishing my crush had just greeted the statement “the world is ending” with “we’ll be on Josh Weir. They had homeroom together, so Nick wrote fine,” so yes, he was clearly a Rhodes scholar. Was there a Guggen- down every stupid or embarrassing thing Josh did and read heim grant or two in Dave’s past? A Nobel, perchance? When you’re it to me after school. Day 9: Josh recites “Dead Parrot” sketch dealing with a towering genius like Dave, nothing is impossible. -- in its entirety for the seventh time. Day 10: Josh wears socks with Nick 96 97 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY sandals. Day 14: Josh’s favorite band is They Might Be Giants. isn’t it?” Day 20: Josh wears sandals without socks; can understand why Oh, the magic of Dave: Death bothered him less than socks are necessary now, this is worse. He never admitted what lazy writing. I steadied myself by looking at him, pretend- he was doing. It was important, for the sake of my dignity, ing I was just a teenager on a date, until the hollowness to pretend Josh was just objectively awful — you don’t like in the pit of my stomach felt more like a crush and less him or anything, do you? Nick said once, his eyes a little too like nausea. He looked back at me, his eyes so green they wide — but I knew. Nick refused to let Josh ruin choir for looked like stained glass windows, lit from within. me. He wouldn’t let me break my heart if it meant walking “Torpor and confusion,” I said. “It means tiredness. One away from my one good thing. of the demon’s plagues. I don’t think they’re zombies. I I could never explain Josh Weir to Dave. It would sound think they’re sleepwalking. You saw Chris, at the end — it small and petty, middle-schoolers gossiping about a boy. was like he woke up.” My stories about Nick were such tiny things — crushes, “At the very end? I mostly saw twitching,” Dave said. concerts, sleepovers — but they were bright little stars, “We have to go somewhere isolated,” I said. “Some- strung across the void of how lonely I was without him. where they won’t hurt themselves trying to hurt us. My dad left me, my mother was too busy for me, the other They’re still people in there, no matter what they act like. kids at school barely knew I existed, but Nick made me They’re victims.” feel like I belonged to someone. It mattered to him that I Dave’s smile was like a camera flash; too bright, daz- was in the world. zling. When he aimed it directly at you, you couldn’t see “It wasn’t bad intensity,” I told Dave. “It was really nice, anything else. before the demons.” “Jenny Long,” Dave said. “The only girl in a zombie “That’s how unhealthy relationships feel when you’re apocalypse who wants to spare the zombies.” in them,” Dave said. “Once the other person’s gone, you The blood on my hands was dry now. More blood was can start to see the damage.” flaking off my face; when I rubbed my mouth, it came away My grief settled into my chest, vast and silent. I knew in little black scabs, as if I’d scraped myself open some- then that I could never share it with anyone. I couldn’t where and refused to let it heal. I hadn’t spared the zom- mourn a boy no-one else had known. bies, not all of them, and I knew I wouldn’t spare them “We have to stay away from people,” I said. “I don’t again, if it came to it. Maybe it made Dave feel better to want anyone else to die that way. Not because of me.” think of me as soft-hearted and sentimental, a nice girl “Yeah, how does that connect?” Dave said. “Can de- who wanted to be nice to everybody, no matter what it mons make zombies? That’s sort of mixing your genres, cost. I knew myself. I knew that if it was kill or die, I would

98 99 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY choose not dying. CHAPTER SIX I didn’t want to choose. I wanted to go somewhere lonely, where the choice would never present itself, and I could pretend to be the person Dave saw when he looked at me. My mind ran over all the locations I knew: What NICK was abandoned at one PM on a Saturday? People would flee to shelter. What would they be avoiding? “I never thought I would say this,” I told him, “but I The end of the world was an old movie, cheesy and un- have to go back to my old high school.” convincing, a grainy image that frayed around the edges. I’d entered some forcefield of unreality, back in that bathroom. My vision got tinny and too-bright, like a cheap PBS miniseries shot on video. Things moved like their frame rate was off. Everything felt cinematic, staged by some unseen director: The light coming though the trees was a Klieg light, the feral, mangled cat running down the street was from Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, Hardy’s ex- pressions looked wrong, like bad acting. I stood in Jenny’s doorway, looking at the unreal world, and thought of A Nightmare Before Christmas. I know, I know: The movie whose merch single-handed- ly kept Hot Topic profitable is not an unexpected reference for me. But I was never supposed to see A Nightmare Before Christmas. It came out in sixth grade, when I was too old for cartoons. My mother took me. That was the year of the chemo, when she was so sick that going to see any movie was a big deal. I could tell she’d chosen one she thought I would like. So I went to see it — gathered up all my manly eleven-year-old forbearance and let my mom treat me like a little kid for a few hours — and I came out changed. For the rest of that year, every time I had to crash at

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Jenny’s, we watched A Nightmare Before Christmas. I got the too old for it, anyway. We probably always were.” VHS tape from K-Mart and played it until the label peeled I could have still watched the movie, but it wouldn’t off and the plastic casing wore smooth in the shape of my have worked. It would only have reminded me how alone I grip. Jenny let me into her house every time I asked. Her was. So I put the tape away, and then I lost it, and then my mother wasn’t there, half the time, so she made dinner by house was destroyed, so I never watched that tape again. heating a can of soup on the stove and divvying a bag of That’s what I was thinking, as I stood in Jenny’s door- microwave popcorn into two piles, a kernel at a time. She way. I was trying to tell myself that the carnage around me fell asleep on me in front of the TV, with her head on my was artificial and that none of this was really happening. I shoulder and her mouth open, and I let her. Something in was pretending that I lived in a controllable world. the way she made that soup told me she hadn’t been put to bed by a grown-up in a long time. The movie got tangled * * * up with all of it, needing my mother and Jenny’s breath on my collarbone and two precisely equal piles of popcorn. I I had a car, was my main advantage, and so, after a brief watched Nightmare often enough for the celluloid to melt and not-too-terrible scuffle on the front lawn — Hardy, into my brain and cause lasting damage. When I closed my being Hardy, had to go poking a collapsed mailman; fortu- eyes, I saw a clay hill spiraling toward the moon. nately, Hardy was so big there was nothing much the guy It wasn’t the monsters that I loved. Not really. It was could do but snap at him, like a cocker spaniel trying to the idea of a world that was perfectly controlled. Every- corral a buffalo — we were off to the library. thing in Nightmare was painstakingly managed, sculpted in “Did you know our library won an award, Hardy?” I cloth and clay and wire and moved a fraction of an inch at said, trying to keep the conversation flowing. a time by unseen hands. What I thought, watching it with Conversation was not my first choice. We’d tried to turn my mother, was how the world would be different for her on the radio, so that we could get some sense of how bad if I could shape it. I thought of going into her blood and things were. That’s how it was supposed to work in this taking out everything that hurt her before the next frame kind of movie: The world ends, but not before our hero started. I thought of magic. rolls up on a bank of TVs in a store window, with useful I called Jenny to see if she’d watch A Nightmare Before narration and international disaster montages. Everything Christmas with me, a few weeks before the end. I was hav- is on fire in Argentina! The Goodyear Blimp has crashed into the ing a bad night. She sighed into the receiver, and I heard Eiffel Tower! Are you seeing this, Brock? There was no news the static of her exhaustion hissing against my ear. when the real thing hit. Channel after channel played back “Christmas was months ago, Nick,” she’d said. “We’re the same eerie silence I’d heard from my clock radio. Not

102 103 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY static, or absence, but a present humming, a microphone figure flung itself out of the shadows and lunged at the turned on in an empty room, a black void where voices windshield of my car. should be. I pulled back in a blind panic, spazzing out so thorough- There was no electricity either — none of the traffic ly that I somehow managed to simultaneously bounce my lights worked. No lights shone in any windows. There skull off the headrest, slam the brakes in a parked car and would be no Internet to check, probably no phone lines. If injure my hand slamming it into the steering wheel. The there was any useful information to be found, it would be horn blared, loudly, which I realized I could probably play hundreds of years old, and locked in a leather-bound book. off as intentional. I was giving a warning signal, trying to It would be in this library. Which, as I’d just told Hardy, frighten the creature off. I was Man, tamer of Fire, master had won an award. of the Natural World, and to make sure my natural world “Did you know that?” I said, pressing through his pal- recognized this, and stopped throwing monsters at me, I pable apathy. honked my car horn again. “I didn’t,” he said. I don’t know why I was thinking this. The only other “Well, it’s true!” I said. person in the car was Hardy, and it was hard to injure my It may not have been true. I wasn’t citing any deep store manly dignity in front of Hardy, seeing as neither of us of library-specific knowledge, I was just repeating some- had any. He hadn’t screamed, when the thing hit us, but thing my mom said, in the same chipper tone, every single his eyes were wide, and he’d flung his arms up in front of time we went to drop off books. My mother’s image float- his face, balling his fists like the Notre Dame mascot. He’d ed up into my mind’s eye again, unbidden; I saw images of also put his thumbs inside his fists, like a four-year-old her corpse, things I hadn’t known how to imagine before I playing He-Man, but I respected the effort. saw Timothy, and pushed them to the back of my mind so The thing on the glass was shrieking; a high, keening that I could keep moving. sound that went on forever, shredding against the sky. If I “This is the best small-town library in America,” I said. pressed past the pain to listen, I could hear that its cry had “Which is amazing, because no-one in this small town words. reads.” “Let me in,” the thing screamed. “I read,” said Hardy. It slammed a single bloodied hand into the windshield. Above us, the library’s shattered windows reflect- Its red-smeared palm landed directly in front of my face. ed shards of blood-red sky. It was barely noon, and the It hit us just once, at first, then over and over, until the world was already going dark. I gathered my breath, get- whole field of my vision was covered over by smears of ting ready to head out into the twilight, and a monstrous dust and blackish blood. The glass shivered in its frame. I

104 105 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY could hear my own voice, keeping time with the blows, in slouching, legs cast wide apart and unladylike, as if she a holy chant of fuck, fuck, fuckfuckfuck. was the only person in the world. She looked like one of Hardy lowered his fists. Slowly, like a man possessed, my Barbies, back when I used to melt them. She looked he tilted forward in his seat, until his forehead was resting like something pretty that had been set on fire. against the shuddering windshield. “What happened to you?” Hardy asked. “She wants you to let her in, Nick,” Hardy said. “I don’t know,” Debra said. “She?” “What does that mean?” I said. Hardy turned to me, eyes wide. In his face, I saw honest “It means I don’t know, Special Ed,” Debra said. “Are fear. you both retarded now?” “Debra,” he said. Hardy’s face collapsed a little. He must have let his “Let me into the car, douchebags,” yelled Debra, be- guard down, thinking we were alone for the duration; he cause of course, that’s who she was. must have thought the end of the world meant he’d never hear that word again. * * * “Call him that again and you can get out of the car, Deb- ra,” I said. Debra piled into the backseat of my car, breathing hard, Debra rolled her eyes like she was a sassy main charac- and didn’t say thank you. I could see why I hadn’t recog- ter in a Nickelodeon show and I was her uptight principal. nized her. The underlying structure was the same — long “It was a joke,” Debra said. “Obviously.” legs and tan and varsity-league muscle, covered with so “I’m a tough crowd,” I said. “I spent most of high school much body glitter you could use her to light your way hoping rats would eat you. Don’t give me a reason to pur- down a dark hall — but her hard, glossy shell had melted sue my dreams.” into goo. She was bruised and limping, missing a shoe so Debra crossed her arms and settled against the back- she moved lopsided, and her makeup had smeared in black seat. I felt the thrill that always came when I’d managed to circles around her eyes. Her pink outfit was so muddy she shut her up. Hardy nodded at me, accepting the favor. looked like a wad of bubblegum on a dirty sidewalk; her “I still want to know what happened,” he said. dark hair was drifting down in ratty tangles from its bar- “I can’t tell you,” Debra said. “I woke up on my lawn rettes. When she pushed it back, I could see that she had like this. Hurt all over. My friends…” a shiner. Another big, nasty bruise spread along her jaw. Debra’s voice trailed off, and her eyes went wide. I’d nev- I studied her in my rear-view mirror, like a terrified er seen her look like that. Debra normally had two moods, Greek planning his line of attack on Medusa. She was “bored” and “lethal,” like a bear deciding whether to maul

106 107 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY a tent full of campers. This new expression looked lost, “Evil is following everyone,” I said. “Take me, for in- overwhelmed. On a human woman, you’d say “scared.” stance. I have Debra McAllister in my car.” I would try to act helpless, I heard Jenny say. Show up at the Debra’s lip curled a little, like a big cat in a zoo, snarl- right moment and convince you to let me in. I tightened my fin- ing at its keeper. She was clearly thinking through which gers on the steering wheel. words she could still get away with. I couldn’t wait for her “Billy and Chris,” Hardy said. “Billy and Chris are to find out the answer was “none.” what?” “I don’t know why you’re looking at each other,” Hardy “Dead,” Debra said, and this time she didn’t bother to said. “Weren’t we going to the library?” insult him. “I think maybe I killed them. Everything was “Right,” I said. “Good news, Debra. I’m about to broad- dark, but I remember I could feel something holding me, en your horizons.” the way you hold a doll, moving me around. Sometimes Debra flipped me off. Her fingernails were that spark- I dreamed I was hurting people. Sometimes I dreamed ly baby blue all the popular girls wore that year; the goal about people hurting me.” was to look cute, and sweet, like sugar almonds and Easter She took a sharp breath and jolted a little, like someone baskets. I thought about the stories our parents used to jerking themselves back from the edge of sleep. tell about trick candy, chocolate bars filled with broken sy- “Your friend,” Debra said. “That fat Amish-looking girl ringes and caramel apples with razor blades inside. Stories you’re always with.12 She was there.” that reminded you everyone was letting things in, all the And Scarecrow, and Tin Man, and Toto too, I thought. But time, and we couldn’t know if they were good for us. Any Debra’s eyes caught mine, in the rear view mirror, and given sweetness might shred you apart. there was no contempt in them. Whatever she had to say was so important she’d forgotten to hate me. “She was the worst part,” Debra said. “There’s some- thing bad in her. I could feel it coming out of her body, like a bad smell. A dead squirrel stuck in a chimney, or some- thing. Evil is following her around.” I felt a sick little flutter in the pit of my gut, remem- bering the thing twitching and scrabbling through Jenny’s house. I shook my head. 12 Okay, there’s clearly a lot to respond to here, but let’s start with: The fat Amish-looking girl who consoled her after her assault. — Jenny 108 109 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY

CHAPTER SEVEN with the stack of carts and knocked him sprawling onto the blacktop, and the sliding doors — they must have been pressure-operated, because they worked in a blackout — hissed and opened and swallowed me up. Jenny Tyler didn’t move, after Dave knocked him to the pave- ment. I didn’t think he was dead, even though he’d skid- ded quite a bit when he hit it, and his face, from what I “It’s fifteen seconds,” Dave said. “Fifteen seconds there could see, looked ripped-open, oozing juice like a leaky and back. I can make it.” packet of hamburger. What Dave and I worked out was We were crouched behind a cash register in Kroger’s. that the sleepwalkers were like the doors — pressure-op- Dave’s hands were wrapped around mine, steadying me, erated. They’d attack when you were right next to them, as he peeked over the edge of the conveyor belt and out but they didn’t move unless you got close enough to set into the darkness. I’d told him my idea, the one about the them off. soup cans, and he actually thought it was a good one. The So that’s what it came down to: You’d live, but only if problem was getting anything out of a store where half the you kept clear of people and made sure they didn’t notice customers wanted to eat you alive. you. I could do that. It’s how I survived high school. The first one had come for us while we were coming in through the front doors, just lunged for us from behind a * * * stack of carts near the entrance. I recognized him. It was Tyler Cord, this super uptight kid a few years older than us “Fifteen seconds to the toilet paper,” Dave said. “The who worked the lights the year I was a fairy in Midsummer only touchy part is that guy by the paper plates, and he’s Night’s Dream. He didn’t like me — I could not remember not in great shape. He can’t have been fast even when he the two lines I had as a fairy, even though one of them was was conscious.” just my character’s name,13 and I’m pretty sure waiting “I don’t know,” I said. “Do we really need toilet paper?” for me to mess up every night wore Tyler’s fragile nerves We’d been going back and forth on this. I thought we to the breaking point — but I still said hi to him now and needed only essentials: Soup cans, flashlights, maybe again, because he worked a cash register here on week- some more soup cans. Dave wanted a whole prep kit. He’d ends. already stolen hurricane candles, shampoo, condoms, a I’m sorry, Tyler Cord, I thought, as Dave rammed into him set of knives from the kitchenware section. Why knives, 13 I want to say… Gin Blossom? Applejack? It genuinely was I didn’t know, because it wasn’t like we needed to carve different every time. — Nick 110 111 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY our soup, but Dave said it was best to be prepared. He tered his eyelids and lunged. I knew Dave would have to just kept adding one more thing to the list, over and over, hurt him now, that it was inevitable, and that Dave would ducking a different sleepwalker every time. I think he actu- try not to make it fatal. What I hated was that I couldn’t ally found it fun — running around, dodging zombies, like blame the guy for anything Dave might do. It wasn’t his he was playing Resident Evil. As nerve-wracking as it was, I fault he was in our way. He was just going to the grocery couldn’t blame him. Dave was made to be a hero. store. Just one more man trying to provide. “We have so much already,” I said. “I don’t want you to get hurt for something I don’t even need.” Dave turned around and smiled at me. He stroked me beneath my chin with one hand, tracing his finger along my throat like he was petting a kitten. “You’ve got a man now, Jenny,” he said. “We’re hunt- er-gatherers. Can’t blame me for wanting to provide.” He launched himself up from behind the cash regis- ter, hurtling over it in one big jump like Jean-Claude Van Damme. I kept my eyes on the guy by the paper towels. He looked so nice; he looked like someone’s dad, with his bristly mustache and polo shirt and soft stomach. He was probably picking up paper plates for a cookout. Maybe his kid graduated yesterday. Maybe he was throwing a cele- bration. I wondered what my dad was doing, when the storm hit. I wondered what he looked like now. I would never know the answer, I realized. I’d played it out in my mind a million times: Some last-minute conscience attack on his part, a phone call, a long drive, a tearful reconciliation. In- stead he had just died, somewhere far away, as someone I wouldn’t recognize if I passed him in a store. Dave skidded past the plates, wobbling a little too close as he took the turn, and the cookout dad rumbled and flut-

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CHAPTER EIGHT Key of Jonah Swallow, that last one being more pornograph- ic than you’d expect, or maybe exactly as pornographic as you’d expect, given the title. “So he’s been a boy this whole time?” Debra asked. NICK Also, this had happened. Hardy and I broke the news somewhere back in Biography and Memoir, more or less on accident, while we were explaining the demonic plot to We picked through the stacks in the dying light. Even destroy the world. She took the demon news pretty well; in darkness, I knew them almost by heart. Our library may maybe all that church-kid stuff had prepared her. She took have won an award — from whom, or whether it mattered, the rest of it surprisingly well, too, but then, I’d given a lot I’ll never know — but to me, and to the guys I knew on of graphic warnings about her being eaten by rats if she Usenet, it had another distinction. The Darbyton Public did otherwise. Library had the most bizarrely, dangerously large occult Still, she was finding ways to make me regret it. Debra section in the Midwest. was talking as much as she ever had when she said mean I don’t know how it happened. Maybe the town was things, but it turned out that when Debra couldn’t say on a ley line or a hellmouth. Maybe some useful order of mean things, she just sort of… talked. Satanic nuns did all the book purchasing. Nonetheless, “I mean, is it like the end of Ace Ventura?” Debra asked. you know how in every horror movie, the library has this I gritted my teeth so hard I could feel my jaw crack. whole section of haunted books for summoning Satan, “Yes, Debra,” I said. “It’s exactly like Ace Ventura, be- and you’re like, what actual library has that? Our library had cause you’re talking out of your asshole.” that. Also a coffee shop, an Internet room, and a special “Calm down,” Debra said. “I know what a [transition, alcove with stained-glass fairy-tale windows for Toddler a process which may entail several social and/or physical chang- Story Time. It really was very good. es depending on the person’s needs, such as name changes, using “Grab anything with ‘Goetic’ on the cover,” I told Har- correct pronouns, hormone prescriptions, and/or surgery] is.14 dy. My friend’s cousin got one. I’m not going to give you a I wasn’t sure what good that would do — Goetia is ba- hard time, I just wanted to use words that… your friend… by-steps basic, as most people teach it, and ours was not would understand.” a basic problem — but it never hurt to have as much on She was waving her hand in circles at Hardy’s face, clear- hand as you could. I looked for the serious stuff,Greater Key ly thinking she’d done a great job of skipping The Word. to the Seven Regions, the Leviathan Gospel, the Most Excellent 14 Debra did not say “transition.” She said what people said in 1999. I mean, most people said it! But still. — Jenny 114 115 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY

“I’ve never seen Ace Ventura,” Hardy said. “I was also out of your spaceship and into the void of space. He had the person who explained this to you.” nothing left to hang onto. “By the way, if you’re a guy, you can’t talk about my “We’re not safe anywhere, bud,” I said. “It’s the end of asshole,” Debra said. “Like half the words you called me in the world. Remember?” high school are off the table now. Chivalry and all.” “But are we specifically safe here,” Hardy said. “Safer I had not realized that I would be expected to do chival- than we would be at another location?” ry to Debra, and I regretted it, not least because I theoret- Nope, I thought. I’d cased the windows of the place com- ically could have just stayed in the closet and pushed her ing in; half of them were broken. Anything that wanted to through a window when I got the chance. I decided to feel get in could. My only consolation was that the swarm had like a good person for not yelling and turned to the stacks, hit already; the aisles were littered with crushed bugs and running my hand along black leather spines and dust and tattered hunks of rat fur, and I could see the well-gnawed crumbling paper edges. corpse of a librarian sprawled out across the end of our My books comforted me. They were so mine. You aisle. couldn’t check any of them out — they were too old and Of course, swarms aren’t unidirectional entities. They fragile — but they belonged to me nonetheless, because could always come back. I was the only person who knew how to love them. Any- “Try not to think about it,” I said. thing in that library that was even a little bit demonic or “It’s just that the rats bit me,” Hardy said. “And the dangerous, I’d read five hundred times. My books remind- mailman. He also bit me.” ed me who I was: A necromancer. A summoner of demons. “That’s the state of the world, Hardy,” I snapped. Someone with whom not to fuck, even if the person who “You’re going to live a long life, full of many more things most habitually and successfully fucked with me was about that might bite you.” two feet away, trailing glitter onto the carpet. Hardy nodded. A stranger might not have seen the pain “Are we safe here?” Hardy asked. that passed over his face just then. I was violating the Hardy was on edge, and not just because of Debra. He terms of our friendship. I was treating Hardy like he was was a creature of routine: Same breakfast every day, same stupid. I knew he wasn’t stupid, and I also knew most peo- bike ride every evening. He really did wear basically the ple couldn’t see him as anything but, because of his whole same shirt all year round, and it wasn’t because he didn’t social-cues problem. Hardy and I were invisible boys; we know how it looked. Dressing got him too stressed out if had a responsibility to each other. We had to treat each he had options. The world coming apart wasn’t easy for other as the people we were, not the jokes the world made anyone, but for Hardy, it must have been like being thrown of us. If we didn’t, we would die unseen.

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“There are locked study rooms upstairs,” I said. “How dy, at least, was behind. We’d forsaken the book cart when about that?” we realized the elevators weren’t running, so he had to “I wish my brother would get a [transition, a process which carry like thirty pounds of books. may entail several social and/or physical changes depending on the “They’re magickal, Debra,” I said. “With a K. They re- person’s needs, such as name changes, using correct pronouns, hor- veal the hidden machinery of the universe.” mone prescriptions, and/or surgery],” Debra pitched in. “My “But there are demons in them.” parents sent him away to prayer camp because he watched This was correct. The hidden machinery of the universe Clueless too much.” was about eighty-five percent demon-based, it turned out. When I looked back, she was leaning against a stack, Still, I saw no reason to concede the point. Tell Debra she paging through a grimoire from the 1800s with a bored was right about one thing, and she’d just keep going, and look on her face, like she was disappointed by the dating going, taking more and more of your brain away until you quiz in the new YM. were following her around with a vacant look on your face, “I mean, he did watch it like fifteen times,” Debra said. punching nerds. “Best case, he’s thinking really disgusting stuff about Ali- “I’m just saying,” Debra said. “At youth group, they tell cia Silverstone. Still. Maybe they’d let him be if he were a us not to even touch Ouija boards. Play games with the girl.” Devil and he always wins. You did a ritual that created Hell She shrugged, and let my book drop to the floor. I saw on Earth, and your plan is to do more demon stuff?” its spine crack, and a soft, pulpy page or two settled onto I walked off the escalator and past Debra, scanning the the carpet. I swallowed several dozen words I could have rear wall for study rooms that looked un-destroyed. The gotten away with in high school and headed to grab a book library had gone through a renovation, in that particular cart. This was inevitable, I told myself. It was my own fault. period of the ‘90s where “modern” meant “all-glass every- You didn’t let someone like Debra near precious things. thing;” the back wall of every alcove was a floor-to-ceil- ing window, which seemed precariously crackable and ex- * * * posed under our present conditions. Most of the glass had not survived the first assault. Still, there was a preserved “These books are Satanic,” Debra said. “You know that, portion, leeward (it means “side sheltered from the wind,” right?” Jenny)15 where the swarm had gone around rather than We were trekking up the stopped escalator, toward the 15 I know what it means! I’m just not clear why going to the second floor. Debra was leading me by a fairly embarrass- library turned you into a salty pirate. You were an eighteen-year-old boy with a Frequent Customer discount at Hot Topic, not Quint from ing distance — athlete, long legs, tall girl, etc. — but Har- Jaws. — Jenny 118 119 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY through. but they can’t improvise. I tacked leeward,16 to the cleanest room, and Hardy fol- “So these are our SPLAT books,” I said. lowed, dumping his thirty pounds of books onto the table. “Storyteller manuals,” Hardy said. I began spreading them out, propping the heaviest ones “Whatever they are,” I said, “they tell us Omphagor’s open to the sections I knew I’d need. rules. They give us the script it has to follow. If we can “She’s right,” Hardy said. “You didn’t tell us what the learn the rules well enough to summon it, we can learn books are for.” them well enough to un-summon it. We can send the devil “You play Dungeons and Dragons, right, Hardy?” I asked. back to Hell.” “It’s a stereotype that all people with social difficulties I looked up at my two companions, and for one clear play Dungeons and Dragons,” Hardy said. “I LARP a Vampire: moment I saw myself: Heroic, posed over my books, a The Masquerade chronicle at Mirror Lake on Fridays.” skinny knot of sinew and intention. “But you have a rule book, right?” I said. “You can’t just “So I was right. The plan is ‘more Satan,’” Debra said. do whatever you want. Someone has to tell you how the “Honestly, I would love to own a casino the night you two vampires turn into bats or whatever.” walked in.” “Level Four Animalism takes a while to gain,” Hardy said. “And you don’t turn into the animal, you project your * * * spirit into it.” “Please stop telling us things about the vampires, I’ll skip the hours it took to unravel everything, the Hardy,” I said, as pleasantly as I possibly could. names of the books I checked and cross-referenced, the sky This conversation actually took a while — he did not darkening to the color of old blood as the light died; the stop telling us about the vampires; I had unleashed a bathroom breaks, the small talk, Hardy going downstairs deep and hidden passion, one he longed to share with his to find a Discman and some CDs from the AV section so fellow man — so I’m going to skip the detailed recount- that he could fulfill his true destiny of not being remotely ing and just tell you now: Demons are rule monsters. helpful, leaning back with his eyes closed and the fuzzy The apocalypse followed the ritual word for word and headphones clamped over his ears. almost in order; portents, swarm, vermin, torpor, bing, It was a long while later when the next important thing bang, boom. Demons like contracts. They like finding happened: Me and Debra, somehow alone in the stacks loopholes in contracts. They can tempt you, or trick you, again, picking through the last of the books. We were down to the dregs now, chipper-looking paperbacks with He “walked” “left,” for my fellow non-ship-captains in the 16 titles like Teen Witch: Wicca for a New Generation, and we still audience. — Jenny 120 121 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY hadn’t found anything I could use. staring. I don’t think I’d ever really made eye contact with “Your friend17 is probably dead, huh?” Debra said. her for that long before. Slowly, her eyes got a little shin- I flinched. I wouldn’t say the silence between me and ier and shakier, and before I knew it, Debra had collapsed Debra had been precisely comfortable, but it had been bet- onto her knees. She just folded up, in a pile of mud and ter than the other option. muscle and glitter, there on the floor. “Why?” I asked. “Did you kill her?” “I don’t want to stay here,” Debra said. “I want to be “No, dingus,” Debra said. “I mean, maybe. I hope not. dead.” It’s just, all my friends are dead too. I wanted to say I was I shook my head, numbly. sorry.” “You don’t,” I said. I nodded. She was lying, and we both knew it; Debra “I was supposed to be in Heaven,” Debra said. “When wasn’t the kind of person who felt sorry for anyone but the apocalypse started, God was supposed to just airlift me herself. Still, I wanted to end the conversation before she out of here with all the other Christians. They told us this took it further. Debra faking sympathy was like a dog per- would be Titanic. You’re supposed to drown with all the forming cardiac surgery. It hurt, having her poke and paw steerage people. I’m supposed to get a boat.” around in my heart, trying to fix things she could never I rolled my eyes. Being consigned to the fiery pit was one understand. thing, but I was also not shocked that Debra had watched “Why was she like that, by the way?” Debra said. “Was Titanic and decided its major takeaway was don’t give poor she homeschooled or something?” people lifeboats. Something snapped in my chest and surged up through “Why didn’t God take me?” Debra said. “I prayed. I my throat. I wheeled around to face her, close enough I went to church. I did whatever my parents said, but God could smell sweat and raspberry body spray. saw there was something wrong with me. He will spit you “Shut up, Debra,” I said. “I haven’t killed you, because out of his mouth. He spat me.” it’s wrong, and Hardy would be upset, but I swear to God, “Can you blame him?” I said. I could put you in a supply closet and lock it and just tell “No,” Debra said. “Not after what those boys did.” Hardy the zombies got you. He’d believe me. If you want She looked up at me, and my breath froze in my throat. to stay here, just stop talking. Now.” I’d heard about it, the thing that happened to Debra fresh- It hung between us for a long second. She looked me man year. Everyone had; the details were cloudy, they var- dead in the face, not fighting, not preparing her retort, just ied from account to account, most people who told the 17 Jenny. His friend, Jenny, who went to school with you for four story managed to make it sound like her fault. No matter years, and sat next to you in bio class, and who consoled you in your what, though, if you put enough pieces together, you saw time of need. — Jenny 122 123 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY a picture of something pretty bad. would make me lonely, and it would make me mad, and “Jesus,” I said. I could never fight the thing I was mad at. I couldn’t call “Don’t take his name in vain,” Debra said. the Savior ugly or throw drink cups at God. If I lived like I knelt down next to her, trying to get my face on her that, I could only hurt the people around me, hitting them level. She flinched. She wasn’t crying, not yet, but she because they were close enough to touch and I could see turned her face from me, as if her sadness were an open the hurt blooming on their faces. Hurt like Debra’s. Hurt cut and I had dirty hands. like mine. “Debra, it doesn’t work like that,” I said. “Not the apoc- “Look, Debra,” I said, “I’m definitely going to Hell. But alypse. Not anything. You can’t go to Hell for something it’s not because I’m a guy, all right? It’s because I sum- you couldn’t help.” moned a demon to kill everyone. You’re not going to Hell “Why not? You are,” Debra said. “My brother probably because someone did an evil thing to you. You’re going is. Anyone who’s gay, or Hindu, or Catholic, or born be- because you’re a mean person and you made my life mis- fore Jesus… I mean, it’s most people. Why not me?” erable for years.” She turned back to me, then. Her face was closer to “I didn’t mean to—” mine than I’d ever thought it would be; I could see the “You did,” I said. “And I gave it right back to you, and pores and baby hairs and swirls of flesh-colored paint that if it ever hurt your feelings, I’m not sorry. Because we’re comprised her. The look in her eyes wasn’t pitiful or lost tough people, Debra. We’re fighters. If either one of us is or fragile. She was just confused, asking a question whose going down, we’re going down by choice.” answer she thought she’d known. Debra rubbed her face with the back of her hand. Smears It was such a lonely idea, I thought; everybody going of dust and paint came away onto her fist. to hell but you. Debra’s whole life depended on being the “That’s sweet,” Debra said. one pure human being, and it would take one mistake to I was horrified to discover that she was right.- Some break her. She lived like an egg baby from Home Econom- how, despite my best intentions, I was being sweet to ics class, perpetually afraid of slipping out of someone’s Debra McAllister. Worse than that, she didn’t seem to basket and smashing onto the pavement. How mean did mind. your house or your family or your God have to be, to send We stopped talking for a little while. I was sitting close some teenager to a re-education camp for liking the wrong to her, close enough to feel the heat of her skin and her movie? How unsafe would you feel if you’d watched your chest shuddering when she sighed, and somehow, for rea- parents stop loving one of their kids? sons unknown to me, I’d managed to throw an arm around It would make me lonely to be Debra, I realized. It her during our little pep talk. When she looked back up at

124 125 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY me, her hair was falling around her face in a cloud, and her eyes were softer than I’d ever seen them. * * * “Hey,” she said. “You know the part in Clueless where Alicia Silverstone gets tired of being popular, and she de- Hodgson’s Gramarye was simultaneously the most and cides she wants to be a good person, and she hooks up least valuable thing in that entire library. It was three hun- with the weird alternative guy18 who’s always lecturing her dred years old, but that meant it had spent three hundred about how awful she is?” years as the world’s most useless piece of literature; any I swallowed very hard. trash anecdote about something spooky happening in Eu- “No,” I said. rope had been thrown in there at some point. Two-headed “Well,” Debra said, “I just want to be really clear that’s cow? Put it in Hodgson’s. Weird comet? Put it in Hodgson’s. not what’s happening here. You’re not going to fist me Lady at the vegetable market said “curse you” and you on a pile of rat corpses, or whatever weird Trent Reznor had to burn her to death on suspicion she was a powerful shit you’re into. We’re just making friends because we’re witch? Sure, why not. On Usenet, it was a running joke, scared.” a way to separate hardcore people from the newbies; did u There were so many ways to die at the end of the world. check Hodgson’s, you’d type to some idiot wanting to learn Mauled by zombies. Drowned in bugs. Or, in my case, you how to make pencils float, sending him off to dig up one of could die of a shame-based aneurysm directly after hearing the three or four copies still on the planet, a months-long Debra McAllister say “fist me.” My face went completely incalculably expensive quest to find an entire book’s worth numb — a mercy, because I couldn’t feel whatever expres- of nothing. sion I was making — and I stood up. I had been sent to check Hodgson’s, in my time, so I “Maybe you’re right,” Debra said. “I mean, the Bible didn’t check it that day until it was way too late, running has basically no good women in it. Devil’s gateway, and through the door of our study room and scrambling to all.” pull it out from beneath my plastic chair. I flipped it open, I just walked away and kept walking, aiming my three- looking for a page I didn’t know I knew. lane car crash of a face down onto the carpet. I didn’t even When I looked up, the sky was dark stone gray, like hear what she’d said until I was halfway up the escalator. cracked and crumbling blacktop, or the windless coma When I did, the answer unfurled in my chest, petal by pet- before a tornado. Even the fire had mostly died out, and al, a rose made of fear and blood. there was only a sick red light fading through the clouds. 18 At least she doesn’t know Paul Rudd’s name, either. I’m start- My stomach had dropped. I thought I might cry again. The ing to think something happened when Dave stomped on her head. whole world was wrong, I realized, wronger than I ever — Jenny 126 127 APOCALYPSE 1999 THE DAY THE WORLD WENT AWAY suspected, and it had been for a long, long time. — INTERLUDE — “I know who Omphagor is, Hardy,” I said. He raised his head and looked sleepily at me, eyes still Entertainments of the Devil half-shut, headphones blaring. I kicked him, under the ta- Being a most excellent account ble, trying to get a response. He peeled the headphones of the Cataclysm of Montriapunto off. His expression was not amused. It wasn’t anything, re- ally, but “amused” was high on the list of things it wasn’t. by Henri de Beaulieu, a Traveller “I’ve had a physically draining day, Nick,” he said. “I know,” I said. “I know who Omphagor possessed. I For lo, I saw Hell hold court, and heard the sweetness know everything now.” of flutes, and drank Rhenish there. And many a man held “Who is it?” court with me, for the Fiend, being inflamed with Lust for The words stalled somewhere between my throat and the world, takes the form the Whole World doth Lust for. my teeth. My tongue was heavy in my mouth, my breath Many be Its forms, for our desire be what shapes it; that stopped, as if my body was trying to freeze itself in the which plots to consume us is best pleased that we wish to be consumed. moment before I told him. It was a world-ending spell Thus among fountains of wine, and trained Apes, and in itself, what I knew; a set of terrible words that would men in suits of silk and crimson I passed, looking for Death. change everything. It came to the summoners bestride a Lion, glittering as the “It’s Jenny,” I said. Once I’d started, I couldn’t stop say- sun. For this was the Tempter Incarnate: A maiden of ex- ing it. “Jenny’s the demon. It’s always been her.” ceeding pride, drunken with wine and her own splendor. Then the glass wall shattered and the world blew in She that had been virgin, disdaining the Summoners, did around me, sharp and hard and painful. I tried to shout indulge their lusts. something to Hardy, but it happened too fast. Something So, in her turning from a child’s ways to those of a wicked heavy connected with my skull. Cut to black. woman, from chaste virtue to a harlot’s wantonness, could her Change and Corruption be sighted plainly — for she did reject and cast off any Friend who might work to pre- serve her chastity and keep her such as would please our Savior in Heaven. And in the Shamelessness with which she pursued her Lusts was the filthiness of her Spirit dis- played. Alas: Such fates are not unknown to women, for their

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Race is Weaker, and it is our Task as Men to guard them from their inclinations. And indeed each woman has a Fiend in her, as all Married men will attest. (A Jest, fellows, to lighten my heavy tale. Am I right? Your own Knowledge shall accord me.) Yet this fallen form, naked and splendorous, was wor- shipped by men countless in number, and their weakness, too, caused them Sorrow. For I passed between them, Part Three their faces twisted, and observed: Truly, lasting laughter is naught but screaming. Dead men’s skulls smile, for they have no lips to plead. Terror Twilight

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CHAPTER ONE to go, what I wanted to do at the end of the world, I knew my answer. I wanted to be cool before I died. I wanted to make out with my boyfriend in the atrium. We hadn’t actually made out yet. Dave had set the hur- Jenny ricane candles in a circle around us, and the firelight flick- ered in the gathering dark, making Dave’s skin glow and ripple with shadow. It ought to have been romantic. But Dave and I sat under a glass arch three stories high, every time I’d try to feel the romance, I’d look up, at those watching the fire in the sky die out and the rippling clouds whirling, ropy gray clouds covering the horizon. I’d look massing overhead. behind Dave, at the bloody bat he’d brought in with us At West High, if you were cool, you had lunch in the atri- from the car. um. It was a big indoor courtyard at the back of the build- “It’s so dark,” I said. “It’s too early to be this dark.” ing, with a glass ceiling and a row of malnourished-looking “Unusual conditions,” said Dave. trees stuck in an elevated planter in the middle. The actual I don’t know how he managed to sound so unbothered cafeteria, in back, had benches and tables, but nobody but all the time. It was a talent. Even in the face of death, Dave freshmen and dorks used them. You just had a few cere- projected the idea that he was doing great and nothing monial bites, grabbed your bag of chips and your Arizona else mattered.1 Iced Tea, and went out to the atrium, so you could lean “It seems so cruel,” I said, “to end the world at three against the wall like a tough guy, or sneakily make out in in the afternoon. Like executing someone before you give an abandoned corner, or just look through that huge glass them their last meal.” arch at freedom. “They still die,” Dave said, shrugging. Nick and I never had lunch in the atrium. Debra was “But they have something to look forward to,” I said. “I out there. We sat at cheap chipboard tables, eating our was looking forward to the sunset. It was going to be my lunch and playing with his Tarot cards, like the dorks we last one.” were. My card was the Page of Cups; his was the Page of Dave reached out and cradled me, the way you cradle Swords; I could tell he tried to make all our fortunes sound your girlfriend who’s about to cry, but I was dry-eyed. I like good ones. Who knows? Maybe they would have been, used to cry so easily, I thought, amazed at myself. I had if we were born in another time. no problems and I cried about them constantly. Now, with There were no more fortunes left to tell. No more con- ceivable futures. So when Dave asked me where I wanted 1 Well, yeah. Dave was eighty. Death was always pretty close. — Nick 132 133 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT the sky about to fall in on me and everyone I knew dead There was darkness in Nick now, but it had always been or dying, I couldn’t shed a tear. I settled into Dave’s chest, there. It wasn’t about the Goth stuff, or the magic; plenty waiting for his warmth to soothe me and set loose the of kids dabbled in Wicca or listened to Marilyn Manson. It sobs I must be holding back, but nothing happened. was something deeper, some well of pain he wouldn’t let Maybe I just wasn’t a girl who cried any more. The me access, that he only ever showed to the world by burn- change that began with Timothy and carried me through ing something down. It was like all those times he said “I killing Billy was getting faster, more intense, taking me wish I was dead” while he was driving. It scared me, and further away from myself every minute. Maybe I could live it made me feel bad for him, but it also reminded me that to be an old lady and still not be teary or fragile or sweet I was in the car, at his mercy, and that he had the power to any more. How would that feel, to be a tough person? drive us both into a concrete embankment or off a bridge.2 Would I even know myself if I were strong? I had chosen not to see where Nick was taking us. I had The clouds rolled in, still sparking with odd bits of fire, chosen to see his kindness, his little-boy bravery, to focus like a cigarette that hadn’t been fully extinguished. They on the ways he used his ferocity to protect people rather looked close enough that I could touch them. Maybe, soon, than the ways he used it to intimidate them. I had decid- they would be. Maybe in the end, the clouds would simply ed long ago not be scared of Nick Casini’s darkness. Yet fall and cover the earth, and there would be nothing left most people were, and always had been, and now that he’d but dark. probably killed them all, I kind of saw their point. “I’m sorry about your friend,” Dave said. “We should be saving people,” I said. For a second, I wasn’t sure who he meant. The storm “You’re saving me,” Dave said. “I’m saving you. Isn’t was rolling through me, too, clouding out things that used that enough?” to be important. He was running his fingers through my hair as he said “That’s not my friend any more,” I said. it, patting my head as if I were a puppy, or a little kid, and “Because of the demon,” Dave said, nodding sadly. I wanted him to keep doing it forever. It felt so good to be “Right.” under the protection of someone bigger than me. Like my It wasn’t because of the demon. Maybe that had been Dad, before he left. Like Nick, but without all the history the deciding factor. Maybe the crazed, obsessive Nick of and baggage, without the obligation to protect him back. the past few months had been something else, someone I could just be the weaker party, with Dave, if I wanted; I else, some foul creature using his skin. But if that were 2 I… am not going to fight Jenny on this. That was an incred- true, what did it mean that I hadn’t been able to tell the ibly fucked-up thing I used to do. Please don’t threaten to kill your- self during an argument, it’s messed up. Please don’t kill yourself, difference? either. — Nick 134 135 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT could just be the girl, the person who got saved. twisted up until they were just a bunch of opinions, but I pushed his hand away. whatever Dave said seemed objective and real and true. “This is my fault, too, you know,” I said. “I didn’t find I wanted Dave to keep saying nice things about me. So the ritual, but I agreed to do it. People are dead now. Why I leaned across the circle and kissed him, hard, while the should I be safe?” candlelight turned us ruddy and golden. It really was ro- “Because you matter,” Dave said. mantic, if you stopped thinking about anything else. The I shook my head, preparing a line of protest. He put his storm rolled over me and through me, roiling and flicker- hand over my mouth. ing like the embers of a dying sun, and I reached for Dave’s “You really matter. Not just to me,” Dave said. “You are fly, because what else was I to do? Why should I resist? so much smarter than you think you are. You are so much How does everyone say they want to spend the end of the cooler than you know. When I look at you, I see someone world? powerful. Someone who could matter to the whole world one day.” I’d never heard anyone say things like this about me. I’d sometimes fantasized about it — like, if I got stuck in an elevator with Keanu Reeves and had to save his life or something, he would probably talk like this before the sex started.3 But I knew better than to expect some real-life guy to sound this way. I knew about real-life guys. My mother had dated enough of them. They tolerated you, and took you to Olive Garden, and let you grab them beers from the fridge. They didn’t make speeches. “You could have any kind of life you want,” Dave said. “But it won’t happen if you go out there and get yourself killed, trying to save a bunch of strangers from something you can’t stop.” It made sense. Dave always made sense; that was the problem. When I was around him, my own ideas got all 3 Wait, why are you in the elevator with Keanu? Why is his life in danger? Is this the opening scene of Speed? Are you Jeff Daniels? If your fantasy is being Jeff Daniels, Jenny, you can tell me. — Nick 136 137 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT

— INTERLUDE — provided the main battering thrust of the swarm, breaking the glass and allowing the insects to penetrate the interior. They also penetrated my mouth. Again. My cock- Notes Toward a Post-Feminist roach-biting example is drawn from experience. Messianic Praxis of The most important part of this picture is Nick Casini, Millennial Crisis Management who had been struck on the temple or thereabouts by a piece of the window frame that had been dislodged by Presented: H. A. P. the swarm. He lay, bleeding heavily and unconscious, at my feet. I got below the main body of the swarm to examine him. I was being hit, heavily, by several hundred birds at once, adding a layer of bruises and potential cracked ribs 1: Entomology to my pre-existing injuries. Upon determining that Nick was unconscious, I heaved The German cockroach is approximately one half inch him over my shoulder and began heading toward the exit, long, light brown, and winged. It is what most people refer hoping I could make it safely down the escalator and to to as a “roach.” The American cockroach, or “waterbug,” our car. My initial efforts were frustrated by the fact that is at least four times its size, a minimum of two inches long. my partner had locked the door, which now actively pre- It is a dark, glossy brown. vented escape. The German cockroach can compress its body and A normal procedure in this instance would be to unlock come through cracks in the walls. The American cockroach the door, but the birds and insects had poured into our can breathe underwater and come through pipes. Either room with such force that I could not see more than two cockroach can live when decapitated, and, for at least inches ahead in any direction. I kicked the door down, dis- some time, when chopped in half. If you bite a cockroach, lodging it from its hinges, and carried Nick down the stairs. half of it can scurry down your throat while the other half Readers may note that it was not difficult for me to kick crawls back out of your mouth. a door down while carrying a full-grown man with one arm, Both German and American cockroaches can fly. This or that I did this while severely injured. I understand how was not an advantage I had considered, until the windows I was perceived: A gentle giant, a human Brontosaurus, a of the library blew in and thousands of them flew into our circus elephant abused by its trainers. Some would find all study room. Along with the cockroaches, I observed the this emasculating. It never bothered me. following: Bees, hornets, standard house flies, much larger Circus elephants kill their trainers all the time. stinging horseflies, and swallows (birds, not insects) who

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2: Eschatology “We’ll find another way out,” she said. Debra ran back into the dark and the swarm. I followed. The bulk of my report will concern the events surround- The windows around the perimeter were broken, and I ing Debra McAllister. These events have been laid forth in initially hoped we might make egress there. This was not previous accounts of the apocalyptic crisis, but never at practicable. Every window we passed had several sleep- great length, or by a firsthand observer. I will therefore go walkers outside. into detail. Debra pulled me behind a stack, crouching out of view I located Debra at the bottom of the stairs, where she of the creatures. had been using the library washroom. “What do we do?” she said. “Just hide?” “What the flip is this?” Debra cried. I found it strange that Debra McAllister would ask me (For the purposes of this section, I am going to have to a question. All her questions to date had been rhetorical: approximate teenage girl dialogue. I was not even very How stupid are you? Can you even talk? Did your parents good at approximating teenage boy dialogue, and I was a know they were making a Frankenstein, or did they just teenage boy. I am not sure that she said “flip.”) electrocute that corpse for no reason? I proceeded past Debra to the library’s front door. I did not know how to answer Debra, so I didn’t. I was “What happened to him?” Debra said. distracted by new noises. Beneath the buzzing and shriek- I opened the door, still holding Nick over my shoulder, ing and flapping of wings, I had begun to hear the squeak- and walked through it. I had learned not to engage in ing of rats. non-mandatory dialogue with Debra. She could interpret “Why did they move?” I said. my meaning, because she followed me into the parking lot I realized that I was now asking questions, and that this and approximately twelve feet out of the front door, in the would invite Debra to talk to me, but I had embarked upon direction of Nick’s car. Then she stopped. the course of action unwisely and could not withdraw. The name for what we faced that day varies. “Sleep- “They didn’t,” she said. “The thing in the dark moved walker” is the polite term. “The torpored,” somewhat them. Whoever they are, they don’t know what they’re do- more theatrical, has its adherents. Most people, tapping ing.” the pop culture vernacular, will say “zombies.” I knelt down and laid Nick on the floor. I was not sure If you’d like, you can say “zombies.” As in, “there were what else to do with the body. I did not want to think of between twenty and fifty zombies standing around the pe- Nick as “the body.” I knew that the longer we stayed in the rimeter of the library, blocking the way to Nick’s car.” library, the more applicable that descriptor would become. Debra gasped, and pulled me back inside. The air Debra leaned over Nick. She touched the wound on his above us was filling with birds and insects. The birds were temple with her fingers. Debra’s touches were also things frantic. Their noise was overwhelming. I knew: An ankle stuck out between cafeteria tables to trip

140 141 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT the unwary, a quick slap knocking binders and textbooks “It really is Titanic,” Debra said. “I just didn’t know I’d from arm to floor, a shoulder thrown almost imperceptibly be Jack Dawson.”4 to the left or right, sending the target reeling into a wall “I don’t understand that analogy,” I said. of lockers while Debra passed calmly by. The ways Deb- “You don’t need to understand, dummy,” she said. ra used her body to affect other bodies were focused on “You need to get on the flipping door.” harm and humiliation, in my experience, and it was star- She did not say “flip.” But she did say “dummy.” I tling to realize she could use it for this, too. remember, because she stumbled over it, trying to avoid “You have to get him out of here, I guess,” Debra said. the other word. Debra remains a complex and problematic “In the car. You can’t let them get to him while he’s passed figure in this history, and the reasoning for her actions has out.” been much debated, so I find it necessary to say this, for “There’s no way out of here,” I said. those who mourn her: Debra McAllister was who she was Debra smiled. It was short. It looked like her face was to the very end of her life. But, by the end of her life, she twitching. was other things too. “There’s always a way,” she said. So Debra ran. She ran down the line from creature to Debra began walking again, back toward the front door. creature, glittering in the light, tapping a nose, a hand, a I picked Nick up and followed. When I caught her, she was shoulder as she went. They turned slowly, but each one looking out the door, at the zombies she used to be. turned toward her, and was soon gaining. A hand grabbed “I miss my brother,” Debra said. “Isaac stopped talking her wrist. A hand grabbed her hair. Debra was stronger to us, when he moved out. Did I tell you that? He was good than most women, and when she wheeled around to punch to talk to. He knew what being in my family was like.” them, the muscle in her knocked them back, but she had Debra placed her hand on the door. stopped running, which was all they needed. “I go out first,” she said. “When they start to move, you I went directly for the car and did not look, as she in- come out behind me. You go straight to the car. You don’t structed. I never saw the end. I never knew whose screams look back. You don’t get involved.” were whose. As I drove away, I decided to forget even the “Involved in what?” I asked. moment when she stopped. So that is what I’ll tell you: I I was asking Debra questions again. This time, she de- remember Debra running. She was someone who helped clined to answer. people. She was the hero of her movie. She was, as far as “You’re the only one big enough to carry him,” she she knew, the world’s final girl. said. “I’m the only one mean enough to fight them. It has to be this way.” 4 Reader: If you get to the afterlife and you wind up Frenching Debra edged the outer door of the library open. A hot Debra McAllister for all eternity, I just want you to know that you wind blew in. She took an unusually deep breath. went to the wrong place. They don’t torture you in Heaven. — Jenny 142 143 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT

CHAPTER TWO almost be ordinary. Just me, and Hardy, out for a quiet drive, and — You know, when you wake up in a hotel, sometimes it takes you a second to remember what city you’re in? NICK Or when you wake up, the morning after someone breaks your heart, and you just forget that you’re sad? I forgot I woke up with my face pressed into the ratty polyester that the car wasn’t supposed to be quiet. My eyes snapped of my car’s back seat. From the rattle of the seat beneath open. me, I could tell that the car was moving. “Hardy,” I said. “Where’s Debra?” I pushed myself up with one arm, looking out the win- dow at the blackening sky. It was darker than it had been; * * * almost full night. My head felt like someone had set off a grenade inside it. When I reached up to rub my face, my We wound up parked at the reservoir, watching the wa- hand came away sticky with blood. ter pour over the concrete wall into darkness. In the fiery “Scalp wound,” Hardy said, from the driver’s seat. twilight, the waterfall looked black, with red glints where “They bleed a lot. They’re not very serious.” it hit the light — wine-dark, like old poets said. Or blood- I decided not to ask why Hardy knew so much about dark. Like a tide, bleeding its way across the world. head wounds. There were aspects of his Internet time I did Hardy and I were sitting on the hood of my car. It was not need to delve into, I figured. an exposed position, but I didn’t care. I wanted to sit out- “The fact that you passed out is serious,” Hardy said, doors while I still could; watch the last of the light die, in that same calm tone. “That could indicate some brain breathe the open air one last time. damage.” “She was very definite,” Hardy said. “I don’t think it Wonderful. The guy barely talked, but when he did, it frightened her.” was always a fucking adventure. I decided to try out my “No,” I said. “It wouldn’t have. She would have wanted new brain by forming a sentence. to have the choice.” “Why are you driving my car?” I said. I was glad Debra got that; control over her own story, a “Something to do,” he said. “Don’t worry. I’m better at chance to decide who she wanted to be. Hardy and I were this than I am at the bike.” not going to get a choice. No-one would. My books were He’d have to be. Otherwise, we’d be dead. I closed my gone, again, and with them, the last chance of saving any- eyes again. If I didn’t look at anything around me, it could one. You’d think we would have reached this milestone

144 145 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT earlier, living in central Ohio, but here it was: Our lives demon. You won’t remember being anybody different. As were finally completely pointless. We’d just ride in loops it snuffs out the last ebbing spark of your human soul, you around town until the gas ran out or we died, whichever will think the whole thing was your own idea. came first. If a demon is a cancer, then exorcism is a sharp knife “Also, I saved your book,” Hardy said. “The one you and a radioactive light and a poison running through your were reading when you started talking about Jenny.” bloodstream. It takes out the demon, but only by taking “Hardy, you need to structure your information better,” parts of you with it. If the demon has real power, and time I said. “You know how they tell you to write an essay? Put to do its work, there won’t be much “you” left when it’s all the important information in the first paragraph? You over. Omphagor had been on Earth for months, and it was need to do that, with talking. And then just leave all the one of the most powerful demons my books could name. other paragraphs out.” The only way to save Jenny now was to destroy her. The He shrugged and pulled Hodgson’s Gramarye out from kindest thing would be to do it quick. where he had apparently been keeping it, which was the Hardy looked down at me. I knew that I’d been silent waistband of his jeans. It had gone a long way down in too long. the world, this book, from being too old to Xerox to being “I think I know, yeah,” I said. “At least, I know how the stored next to the unthinkable regions of Hardy Patrick, last people did it.” but we’d all fallen on hard times lately. I opened the book and flipped to the end of de Beau- “You know who Omphagor is,” Hardy said. “Does that lieu’s account — it was quite the account; most of it was mean you know how to beat it?” about his wife, after a while, and her overly frequent visits “You don’t beat a demon,” I said. “You exorcise it.” to a local goose vendor — and shoved the book over to “You know how to exorcise it, then,” he said. Hardy. He was right; I did. I also knew that exorcising Om- “There,” I said. “Right at the end. Under the engraving phagor was going to kill the possessed person. of the trained ape.” Possession doesn’t work the way you think it works, He leaned down, adjusting his glasses. some creature putting you on like a suit jacket. Most “For truly, goose is a pleafaunt meal to eat upon a people who are possessed don’t know it. Your demon Christmas Day,” Hardy read, slowly, “but what man needst nestles in the hidden parts of you. It warps the bits of you dine upon it twice a week, while his wife dallieth with the that are already bad, turning normal flaws into encroach- lady whomst does the butchering?” ing tumors, until your flaws are all you have left. By the I couldn’t even be mad. Like I say, that part took up a time you are fully possessed by the demon, you are that lot of real estate. I just pulled the book back onto my lap.

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“For that men’s lust and vile impurity brought forth ic makeouts, I was also learning that for me, encounters Omphagor, only manly purity could drive him out,” I read. with men and women were equally defined by awkward “Two men were found in the village, who had never laid silence and encroaching dread.5 lustful hands upon a woman, nor pressed their lips to a “You know who’d really be up a creek,” I said, “is Mrs. maiden’s lips, and by them a dagger was forged, that did Beaulieu and the goose butcher. Right?” slay the fiend.” “Do you think he knew?” Hardy said. Hardy collapsed in on himself a little, drawing his shoul- “I mean, his job description was ‘traveller,’” I said. “You ders in over his broad chest, and turned away to watch the have to figure he was out of town a lot.” bloody waterfall. It only flowed steadily after a heavy rain, and today, it was spitting water in drips and gushes, like * * * the pulse of arterial spray from a slashed throat. Not that I’d seen the pulse of arterial spray from a slashed throat, When Hardy and I got back into the car, I felt almost mind you, but it seemed like I was maybe gonna. good again. The world was still ending, and most of the “What’s wrong?” I asked. people we knew were dead, and I had to murder my best “No kissing,” he said. “Leaves us out.” friend — Hardy’s friend, too, at least by the transitive He was such a noble giant. He was genuinely sad about property — but things were looking up. Still, even as we it. If you told another guy that he’d doomed the planet by started the engine and headed out to save the day, I was being too sexually active in high school, he’d be psyched. asking myself the same question you are: How were two “Hardy,” I said. “I’ve never kissed a woman. I’ve wanted teenage boys, both of whom had failed shop class, sup- to, but I haven’t. Have you ever kissed a woman?” posed to forge a dagger? “I’ve kissed you,” he said. “So, no.” “I wish Debra was here,” I said. “There you go,” I said. “Contracts and loopholes. We I hadn’t even really meant to say it — just thinking could probably fuck on the hood of this car and still get aloud, a half-mumbled thing that fell out of my mouth and the job done.” into the world where it could embarrass me — but Hardy The silence stretched out between us forever, first com- nodded sorrowfully. panionably, then horribly, a yawning invitation to a con- “Because of your sexual tension,” he said. versational segue that did not exist. This was the second I repressed the urge to open the car door and throw time today I’d almost had a cinematic thank-God-we’re- myself out into the road. alive makeout with somebody, I realized, and while that “Because Debra liked hurting people,” I said. “She’d was an improvement on my lifetime total of zero cinemat- 5 He’s being a little unfair to himself. I’ve seen him blow it with non-binary people, too. — Jenny 148 149 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT have ideas about how to make a knife.” CHAPTER THREE She would. She’d carve one with her teeth, if need be. She’d also be ready to use it, which, I suspected, would be my other main problem. I could be emotionally brutal, but that was only useful if we planned to defeat the demon by Jenny harshly critiquing its worldview until its self-esteem col- lapsed. Maybe life always broke down that way, I thought. There was no one definitive moment when I decided We found the weapons that served us in high school and to kill Nick Casini. It seems like there should have been; used them forever: Talkers and fighters, thinkers and do- I loved him, I was closer to him than anyone, before Dave ers, nerds and jocks. showed up, and then there I was, with a baseball bat in That was the last thing Debra did for us that day, be- my hand, planning to smash his skull. I should be able cause I was thinking about jocks when it hit me. I knew to pinpoint the change — how it was that one minute I where we were going to forge the dagger. I knew how we couldn’t imagine a life without Nick, and the next, I was could save the world. ready to finish his life right there on the floor of our old Before I could talk myself out of it, I took a hard left. high school, to leave his skinny body crushed and twitch- Hardy snapped up against his seatbelt and threw one hand ing like a bug that had wandered underfoot.6 to the ceiling to keep from coming down on top of me. He I wish I could tell you exactly how I got from Point A looked at me, puzzled, but then he took in the scenery and to Point B, from loving Nick to wanting him dead. But it saw it. We were riding fast with the black reservoir behind didn’t come down to one big moment. It wasn’t a decision us and the bulk of the school sprawled before us like a spi- I made with my conscious mind. I just slowly realized I der, luring us in. had to do it; it was a feeling that grew into a suspicion, a suspicion that grew into a certainty, a certainty that rooted itself in me so deeply that it felt like I’d known it all along. That’s not dramatic, though. It doesn’t make for good storytelling. So let’s say there was a point where I could have avoided it. Let’s at least pretend I had my hand on the wheel. If so, the choice didn’t come down to reason or persuasion. I didn’t spend hours in tearful introspection

6 It’s so unnecessarily vivid! Have I angered you in some way, Jennifer? Is there some grudge you’ve been holding? — Nick 150 151 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT while I gazed at Nick’s photograph. The decision to kill we had managed to get several dozen cans of soup in that Nick, if there was one, came down to peanut butter crack- grocery store without getting a can opener. ers. “Any luck?” I called out, entering the kitchen. “Depends how you define ‘luck,’” Dave said. “Is it ‘a * * * lifetime supply of peanut butter crackers?’” He was on his knees on the counter, his head and shoul- Dave and I had pulled our clothes back on, part-way and ders buried in some high cabinet. As he spoke, he pulled crookedly, after having them off together. I washed myself himself and the pallet of crackers back out, and slammed up in the sink of the bathroom behind the auditorium. It them down for me to see. I recognized them: They were was the sink where I had seen Debra crying, I realized, the same crappy snack schools keep everywhere, neon or- splashing water over my face and smoothing my ratty hair ange cheese crackers sprinkled with salt, with an almost back. I paused, waiting for the information to bother me. solid pat of peanut butter, like a thin line of mortar, gluing It didn’t. Lots of things had happened at that sink in the the two crackers together into a sandwich. They came in past four years. Debra’s pain, her lost humanity, was just individually wrapped cellophane packets that you had to one more ghost, one more girl sobbing in a bathroom. I rip open with your teeth. The brand name on the pack- had never been close enough to the soft, feeling Debra to age was nothing you’d recognize; the company made these mourn her, only to know that she was there. I just walked crackers and nothing else. Like God, they beheld their cre- away and went to join Dave in the kitchen. ation, and rested, seeing it was Good. It was funny: I could have sworn the electricity was out. “I love these,” I said. “I used to steal them.” It had been when we first arrived. But as night fell, some I ran my hand along the pallet. The thin, crinkling hidden generator must have kicked on, because the whole sound of the cellophane helped me remember that I had school was suddenly blazing with crappy fluorescents. It belonged to a better world. Dave laughed at me. reminded me of coming in late to see a school play, or “Jenny Long, thief,” he said. “Someone should have something, all that flat white light against the black sky. warned me.” It wasn’t beautiful, but it was more civilization than I had Something in his tone stung me. It was like the way ever expected to see again. you laugh when a kid says a curse word. Dave thought I The kitchen was in back of the cafeteria, just a narrow was some innocent little girl, some Reese Witherspoon he aisle of brushed steel and white tile glittering in gray fluo- was ruining. I did plenty of bad stuff. I looked at porn on rescent light. Dave was busy excavating the cabinets. You the Internet, I cursed, I’d puked up half a flask of pepper- would not think this, but somehow, between Dave and I, mint Schnapps on Nick’s bed once. I wasn’t innocent. I

152 153 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT was young. There’s a difference. tor-2-Sarah-Connor vibe I was going for. “First grade,” I said. “There was a supply closet next “I really am sorry about your friend,” Dave rumbled. to the bathroom that was always unlocked. I just… you “Not my friend,” I reminded him. “But thanks.” know, I just hated being there. I hated first grade. So that “I mean, I’m sorry about the implications,” he said. was how I got myself through it. Every time I went to the I twisted up to look at him. Dave was turned away, bathroom, I took a packet of peanut butter crackers and squinting up at the fluorescents. He kept his face turned ate them in the stall.” away from me as he spoke, as if he found it hard to look They kept them around for the diabetic kids, I didn’t at me. I studied his noble profile, his mouth turned down add. I got caught, and they yelled at me, and told me I with what really did seem to be pain. could be endangering someone really sick. I kept steal- “What you said, about wanting to save people,” Dave ing them anyway. Everyone was mean to me, and even if I said. “It stuck with me. What if there’s a way?” wasn’t diabetic, I thought the school owed me something, “You mean, like, look around for survivors? Gather for putting me through that. I thought I could steal nice- people up, keep them here in the school?” ness from the world. Dave shook his head and looked down at me. “First bad thing I ever did on purpose,” I said. “I’ve seen enough of these movies,” he said. “Demons Dave smiled broadly and spread his long arms, like a always have a weakness. Some button you push where showman revealing his trick. everything shuts down. You know, just stab the problem “Look how far you’ve come,” he said. with a mystic dagger or something and everything goes “Yeah,” I said. “I work on a global scale now.” back to normal.” I focused on ripping open my pack of crackers. Dave, We didn’t have a demon to stab. We only had a Nick. In sitting on the counter, scooped me up in his arms and a better story, about a better person, I would have gasped brought me onto his lap. I studied the wobbly cartoon map aloud in horror. I would have at least argued. In this story, of the US on the front of his orange T-shirt, the single though, I understood what Dave meant, and as he said it, word PAVEMENT written in cartoon letters across the en- I somehow understood that I’d been thinking the same tire US, like the name of a Nickelodeon show. thing. The t-shirt and the crackers were the same color, some- I looked at the pack of peanut butter crackers in my lap. thing not found in nature. The color of cheez, with the This was what I had, before I had Nick Casini; cheez, so- z. Something about it made me feel safe, like being a kid dium, a hardened little wedge of peanut butter that I had again. That, and sitting on a guy’s lap like he was Santa. to soften with my spit to get the flavor out of it. The only That really killed the whole hardened-survivor, Termina- sweetness in my life was sugar, and I was willing to risk

154 155 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT killing some sick kid to get it. — INTERLUDE — I stopped stealing crackers when I met Nick. I stopped stealing kindness when someone gave it to me. He was Letter my friend, my only one, and the demon ate him alive. Om- From the belongings of Gloria Casini phagor had taken what I loved and left me with fucking Dated February 21, 1999 crackers, and when I thought about that, I knew that I could kill it. I could tear Nick limb from limb and set the Honey — pieces on fire,7 just to make sure that thing wasn’t touch- You are about to graduate high school! This is such a ing him any more. time of importance in your life. I want you to know how “We don’t have a dagger,” I said. proud of you we are. It seems like yesterday that you [SEC- “No,” Dave said. “We have a bat.” TION MISSING]. It is a time of big changes for everyone. That can be scary or wonderful. Sometimes both. This next change [SECTION MISSING]. Honey, I am very sorry, but I want you to listen to this before you say anything. You should [SECTION MISSING] [SECTION DESTROYED] [IT LOOKS LIKE BURNING]

7 Jesus Christ, did I eat all your Doritos again? Did I forget your birthday? Why is it important to you that I read these things? — Nick 156 157 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT

CHAPTER FOUR do it. I won’t leave until I have to, I said. When did Jenny let go of me? She had always held on so tightly; I had wanted her to toughen up, grow up, learn to stand on her own. Then she did, and I realized that Jenny NICK was gravity. She weighed me down, sure, but she also kept me from floating off into space. Jenny had probably always It didn’t feel real until we reached the school. I told you known, on some level, that I depended on her as much as that I planned to kill Jenny, and that I was in a good mood she did on me; that I got stronger by having someone who about it, which I know makes me sound like a sociopath, needed saving. I should have understood, months ago, but I still felt like I was pretending. The field of unreality that a Jenny who could leave me wasn’t Jenny any more. kept my emotions glassy and thin, the way you feel for Now I was going to kill her. I had proof it was necessary. the characters in a movie you’ve seen maybe twenty times. I should have been determined, I should have been reso- Nothing felt good or bad any more, just interesting or dull. lute, and instead, for one terrible moment, I was fright- Mostly dull. ened, and I wanted her to come hold my hand. I mean. That’s what sociopaths say, too, but I thought, “Why are the lights on?” Hardy asked. in my case, it was probably trauma. “Backup generator,” I muttered, and I rubbed my face When we arrived at West High, it hit me all at once. with my hand until the bad moment passed. The glass between me and the world shattered, leaving I lifted my head to stare down the bulk of the school, its me exposed and open to the wind. We were in the parking sad gray fluorescence flickering against the blood-dark sky. lot, staring down the school’s front entrance, and I could I could feel, more than see, the lobby visible through the remember Jenny so clearly, for a second. I was thinking of glass: Trophy case, Achilles mural, giant letters painted her on the first day, freshman year, with her puffy sneak- over the front door so they were the first thing anyone saw ers and her hot pink scrunchie and her braces. God, what each morning: ARE YOU LIVING LIKE A GLADIATOR? braces. She had that pale, freckly face, and a mouth full of Was I? If not, it seemed like I was about to start. I aimed metal, and neither of us ever would have guessed she’d my beat-up old car at the front entrance, squaring up sev- turn out pretty. eral tons of dinged-up metal and black paint at the place Jenny was frightened, and when we walked through the I’d waited so long to escape. I stared, for one long second, front door, I let her grab my hand. Don’t leave, she’d said. at that glittering world. The rich kids’ world, the pretty As if I had a choice. As if I could just skip all my classes world; the world that had never wanted me or Jenny in it. and follow her around. In the moment, I almost wanted to Hardy turned to look at me, puzzled, as I slammed my

158 159 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT foot on the gas and brought us speeding up to the glass though, and I figured we would kill ourselves or get eaten doorway. And through. before we’d so much as learned how to heat the metal. I didn’t have time to forge a sword of legend. Our dagger * * * would have to be like our lives: Improvised. Unconven- tional. Probably stupid-looking. Who’s to say? Any dag- “It’s just that we have a problem with monsters getting ger’s a good dagger, if it stabs.8 through windows,” Hardy said. So here we were, in my second-least-favorite room of Hardy and I were picking our way through the darkened West High, because my plan depended on it. Jenny was gym, tripping on stacks of gym mats as we went. This part a dork; I was a freak; Hardy was a reject. But our school of the building did not have full lighting yet, just a few did have a small, select number of nerd-nerds, the classical orange safety lights gleaming dully above the bleachers. variety, the kind of people whose very presence implied The dim light on the floorboards reminded me of school the possibility of cosplay or some kind of Ren Faire. All of dances — the way they looked in middle school, when those nerds, as it turned out, took fencing. Jenny and I could still go together without giving anything I tried the handle of the supply closet. away. It made me think of Jenny, in that ludicrous purple “It’s locked,” I said, looking up at Hardy. dress she wore to senior prom, waving to me as I stood on Hardy shrugged, lifted one massive, sneakered foot, my front doorstep and watched Dave drive her away. and kicked yet another door in. It was a large, metal door. “I don’t see why we broke the windows,” Hardy said, It was heavy. It clanged when it hit the wall. Hardy looked “if we don’t want monsters getting in.” down at me, face blank, and I was suddenly very sorry I’d He would not stop bringing this up. He was right, which 8 Guys tell each other stuff like this all the time, and though it may have accounted for why he would not stop bringing it sounds nice and encouraging, I have to say: You’re still making it too up, but it was distracting. I squinted across what felt like much about the dagger. Stabbing’s great, yes, it’s a classic murder miles of dark, to see if I could spot the door of the supply method. But you could also use your hands to murder, or — here’s closet in back. an idea — your mouth. Lots of people get a much bigger, gorier payoff that way. Sure, right, your dagger’s your dagger, but it’s not I had a plan. It wasn’t shop class. I had, don’t get me the only tool you’ve got. Over-relying on it can actually make for a wrong, considered shop class; I didn’t really pay attention worse murder. Next time, just start manually, with a little light stran- there, just carved pentagrams into my desk and tried not gulation. You might be surprised how far that gets you. If that’s work- to amputate anything on the table saw, but I figured they ing, and you want to switch things up, you can move on to… okay, might have the facilities for some kind of blacksmithing. yeah, Nick is reading this over my shoulder and frantically making the “cut” motion, so just think about this, OK? Go get ‘em, killer. — That implied that Hardy and I would learn to blacksmith, Jenny 160 161 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT made him angry about the windows. Hardy moved past me into the closet, dragging the plas- I dodged past him, into the supply closet, and found tic bin of fencing foils out into the dim light of the gym. the bin full of fencing foils. I pulled the nearest one to “Are we making any more knives?” he asked. “There are me; I wanted something shiny, newer metal for a stronger at least a dozen foils here.” impact, so I held it up into the ghostly orange night light “It’s not a knife,” I said. “It’s a mystic dagger.” to see if it gleamed. I really couldn’t tell. I wasn’t the kind “We have one mystic dagger,” Hardy said. “Why?” of nerd who could tell a good fencing foil from a bad one. I was beginning to miss the days when Hardy was my What I did know was that a fencing foil couldn’t hurt silent friend. anyone. Not yet. Its metal was springy, made to bend when “I don’t know, Hardy,” I said. “Why wasn’t there more it touched someone, and its tip had been blunted off. I than one Ark of the Covenant? Why was there only one tested the door to see if Hardy had busted the hinges — it Holy Grail?” still swung — and positioned my foil on the jamb of the “Because it was hard to mass-manufacture things in door, half in and half out. the Middle Ages, Nick,” Hardy said, mildly. “Obviously, if “Here,” I said. “Slam that door for me. Hard as you can. King Arthur had several Grails, they wouldn’t have had to Don’t hold back on my account.” spend all their time looking for one.” He did not. There was a bang so loud it emitted its own It was hard to communicate the intangibles to Hardy. little shock wave, and the thin, high sound of snapping I ignored him and focused on the magic: The broken-off metal. Then I was stumbling back, holding my new dagger. piece of myth now resting in my hand. It didn’t start off as It honestly did gleam, when I held it up to the light. a dagger, my dagger. It had lived its little life as a fencing Maybe I was fooling myself. But there was a wild edge to foil, a tool for dorks and children, never expecting it would it now, a bit of magic that made it sparkle. It wasn’t much be called into service. Now, it was the most important ob- else other than shiny — as I had foretold, it looked kind of ject in the universe; the only destined weapon that could dumb, just a hilt with a single square-edged length of met- slay the Devil and save humanity. al, about as long as my fist, protruding from its base. The Things don’t always start off looking like what they are, blade snapped off awkwardly at the end to make a jagged is my point here. A shape can be freed from another shape; point. It wasn’t even a dagger, really, more of a shiv, but I a sword can be pulled from the stone of its old self, and it could see, without testing it, that the broken point would will gleam. Blood, pain, and sharp metal: At the right time, be sharp enough to draw blood. Especially if you shoved it for the right reasons, it can save the world. into someone with great force, which was what I intended to do. * * *

162 163 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT

You have to trust me to save you back.” I was still staring at the dagger, reaching out a finger to He nodded, and put one hand on my head, like a ben- test its sharpness, when we heard the noise in the hallway. ediction. I stood still, uncomfortable, just sort of letting It sounded human, or formerly-human; smallish, moving him do it. He’d never touched me that way before, and fast. There was some extra gait in its step, a metallic clunk I wasn’t sure what it meant. Or I knew exactly what it and drag. My mind briefly went fractal, a dizzying whirl of meant, and just wasn’t sure how to respond. I knew the mess like a Magic Eye poster, as I tried to imagine every answer I had might not be the one he wanted, but it was horrible thing that noise could be. the best I’d got, one of the best I gave anybody: I never fell Hardy stiffened beside me and put his hand on my in love with Hardy Patrick. Some people, you don’t fall for. shoulder. It was sweet; protective. Yet only one of us could Some people you just love. hold the dagger, and only the dagger could protect us from Hardy turned, without another word, and left through what was coming. I knew that Hardy, no matter how big or the rear doorway. I turned to face the front hall. As I did, strong he was, could not be the one to kill Omphagor. He the door swung open, and a slice of dazzling light arced might be a tank, but his heart was true, and he didn’t have across the floor, making me squint. There was a shadowy it in him to stab a girl that much smaller than himself. figure in the open doorway. I couldn’t make her face out, I had it in me. She wasn’t smaller than me, for one but I knew her. Even if I killed her or she killed me, I would thing. So I looked up at Hardy and told him: “Run.” always know her. He didn’t protest, but he didn’t move, either. He looked “Jenny,” I said. down at me with those big, stunned eyes — Jenny was The first swing of the baseball bat hit me in the jaw. right; they were newborn eyes, with no malice in them — and asked me a question without asking. “I’m armed,” I said. “I can take care of myself.” “So could Debra,” said Hardy. “Until they killed her.” He still didn’t move. I felt like John Lithgow in Harry and the Hendersons, like I was supposed to start hitting him on the chest and weeping. The footsteps in the hall were coming closer; I didn’t have time for the big goodbye, or even any time to convince him. “Hardy,” I said, in my are-you-listening-to-me voice. “You saved me in the library. You have to do this for me.

164 165 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT

— INTERLUDE — CHAPTER FIVE Letter From the belongings of Gloria Casini Dated February 21, 1999 NICK

[ILLEGIBLE] had to write this down is that I know you It’s still me. I’m still here. It’s still me. won’t like it. You are not good at separation. I just want this The bat connected with my jaw. I swung back on my to be the easiest and best time it can be. I know that no heel, spinning with it. The whole world behind my eyes matter what it will not be easy. went black with golden sparkles fading along it like fire- I know you love [SECTION MISSING] I’m your mother. I works. always [ILLEGIBLE] maybe by Christmas [ILLEGIBLE] As I spun, she hit me again. She must have been aiming [DOCUMENT ILLEGIBLE] for the ribs. She half got them. She got my gut, too, right [IT LOOKS LIKE TEARS] along the side. Was anything broken? I had never broken a bone, I re- alized. I wouldn’t know what it felt like. If breaking a bone felt like the whole shape of you coming apart, the things that were supposed to hold you upright crumbling and giving way, if it felt like being destroyed from the inside, then I knew what it felt like. If that was what it felt like, all of my bones had broken at once. If a heart breaking feels like the thing that holds you together shattering, if it feels like some secret inner sup- port coming apart and shredding your soft tissue with its jagged shards, then I knew what that felt like too. My heart had been broken for a very long time. “Get out of him,” Jenny said. I should have had a one-liner ready, or at least asked her what she meant. I said nothing, because I couldn’t breathe. I was bent over, with my arms wrapped around

166 167 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT my gut. Every time I tried to inhale, I could feel something “What is wrong with you?” Jenny said, panting and hold- sharp poking into me, drawing blood. Jenny readied the ing her mauled hand by the wrist. bat, like a policeman with a nightstick, ready to dole out Everything, I thought. Everything everything everything. I some brutality she’d convinced herself was corrective. was ice cold. I felt like I was standing in a walk-in freezer. I She swung again, but I was already moving, barreling couldn’t move. If Jenny wasn’t possessed — if Jenny wasn’t into her. I wrapped my arms around my best friend’s waist possessed and I had stabbed her — if Jenny wasn’t pos- and slammed her into the wall. Most guys who write sen- sessed and I had stabbed her and she knew I had stabbed tences like that are about to describe some bad, sweaty her — the train of thought kept collecting new cars, on and decisions in the back seat of a Toyota, but I wasn’t that on, and I couldn’t stop it. dumb. I was just trying to commit a murder. “Jenny,” I said. “Please believe me. I thought you were She was startled. Her grip on the bat slipped. I ripped —“ it out of her hand and threw it away. She looked up at me, I didn’t get to finish the sentence. Jenny pulled the dag- furious, and tried to push me back, but I had her. She tried ger out of her palm, like a maniac, and ran toward me, and to throw a hand up to shield herself, but she could not be that’s how I got stabbed in the face. shielded. I brought up the dagger and shoved it, fast, into her throat. I didn’t do that. I thought I did, but I didn’t. Her hand was in the wrong place, so as I watched, almost mesmer- ized, on some internal slo-mo replay of adrenaline and re- gret, I pushed the jagged point of the dagger into the cen- ter of her palm and right through her hand. Jenny looked at me, her pale eyes wide with confusion and horror, and suddenly I knew: I did that to a person. She wasn’t a demon, she was a person. She was Jenny. Oh, my God, I thought, I stabbed Jenny. I stumbled back, leaving the dagger lodged in her hand. It took her a minute to start screaming. When she did, it was awful. I had stabbed Jenny in the hand, and worse than that, she was hurt. Or she was angry. Or both. Even- tually, the scream resolved into words.

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CHAPTER SIX at it, awestruck by the sight of my own blood bubbling up and around the blade, my formerly impermeable and self-contained palm skewered like a marshmallow on a camping trip. For a moment, the world was perfectly still Jenny around me. I was so amazed that I forgot it hurt. Then it started hurting, and I was furious. I screamed at How did he get a knife? I remember thinking, right before him, and he started babbling some excuse, and I just ripped it went through me. the knife out of my hand, the pain making the whole world Dave and I had heard the sound of something big and flash red and nauseous for an instant, and raked the point dangerous crashing through the entrance, and had come of the shiv hard across his face. He says he got “stabbed out to check on it. We split up a few hallways in — I had in the face,” when we talk about this. He didn’t. I was the our only weapon, but he was a guy, so as I understood one with the puncture wound. But I ripped a good long it, we were even — but even alone, when I should have flap of skin open, along his cheekbone, barely missing his doubted myself, anger and fear had kept me going. They eye, and it was bloody. propelled me across the gym floor. They pumped adrena- He screamed as I cut him, and staggered back, and I line through me as I raised the bat. They got me halfway threw the shiv away across the gym floor, hearing it rat- through killing Nick, without regret or remorse ever once tle and clang off into the darkness. Before he could rally, clouding my purpose. I grabbed his shirt with my one good hand and used the The one thing they hadn’t done, evidently, was give me other to punch him in the nose. As my fist landed, I heard better eyesight. I’d left my glasses on the floor of the atri- the crunch of his profile getting more distinguished. um when I got dressed, so I didn’t see the knife in Nick’s I just kept hitting him, hard, with my whole hand and hand until he was aiming it at me. His face was so close with my bloody one. I should have stopped. I should have to me, as he shoved me up against the bleachers, and as worried about the damage I was doing. Half of his face had I looked past the knife to his dark eyes, I realized I knew been bloodied up when I got there; he’d clearly been hurt that face better than my own. I only saw myself every once already. But I wasn’t hitting Nick any more. I wasn’t hit- in a while, in a mirror, but I looked at Nick Casini for hours ting someone I loved or worried about, I wasn’t even hit- every day. ting a person: I was hitting the monster who had stabbed But I know you, I was thinking. You can’t stab me. I know you me. It was all self-defense, I thought, and I kept thinking too well. that even when I realized that he wasn’t hitting me back, Then the shiv went in, and through, and I was staring or that all he was doing was trying to back up or shove me

170 171 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT away from him, or that he was crying. Nick looked at me. Not the way you’d look at some He was crying. As he tried to back up, his boot slipped woman who just tried to murder you; I could have taken in blood spatter — his, mine; there was so much of it I that. There would be hate, or pain, or anger, I would know couldn’t tell any more — and he went down on his side. myself to be an evil human being — I was still pretty sure, I could see the tears streaking through the dirt and blood in that moment, that I was an evil human being — but he on his face as he lay below me. You’d think that would be would at least be reacting. The look in Nick’s eyes just the thing that clued me in, that I would relent, because then was dead, blank. He was looking at a stranger. a demon wouldn’t be crying over a teenage slap fight. It “Nobody else is ever going to know all this about you,” wasn’t. Nick said. “No-one, for the rest of your life, is going to “Jaxom,” he said. care what you cried about in third grade. But it never His voice was a broken-down whisper, but from where mattered. I’m just some fucked-up egg you found in the I stood, hanging over him, I was close enough to hear it. garbage. I was your pet mutant. Now I’m the weird friend The breath went out of me, and I fell to my knees. you’re outgrowing.” His voice was so level, like he was reading the news. I * * * could feel him getting further away from me with every word out of his mouth, receding into some place where I “When you were little,” Nick said, “you had those drag- couldn’t reach him and didn’t touch him. I thought about on books you were obsessed with. Your favorite guy was the black wave I had seen in my dream, swallowing Nick Jaxom.” up and carrying him away from me. I thought it was Hell. I I reached out to Nick with my good hand. I don’t know hadn’t realized it might just be the future; the world where what I meant to do — touch his injuries, convince myself Nick didn’t love me any more. they were real, or just wipe the tears off his face. He dodged “It isn’t true,” I said. “It isn’t. You’re my best friend. I me and wiped them off himself. His face was wrecked, and need you.” his fist came away gory. Nick looked away from me, into the dark. “He found a dragon egg that wasn’t supposed to hatch,” “Need,” he said. “Need isn’t love. It isn’t care. It isn’t Nick said. “The dragon in the egg was all fucked-up. It was even like. You’re going to stop needing me, Jenny, and then too small, and it was albino, and it was just basically this what will you do?” gross mutant, but Jaxom chose him anyway. You loved Jax- “I won’t stop,” I said. om, because he picked the White Dragon.” “You will,” Nick said. “You have. The second someone “I don’t understand,” I said. better came along, you were done.”

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I shook my head. I could feel the conversation slipping CHAPTER FOUR out from under me, like I was standing on a conveyor belt covered in grease. I knew I loved Nick; I knew it the way I knew I had two arms and ten fingers. It was a basic fact of how I was built. He just didn’t believe me, and wouldn’t NICK believe me, and by the time he was done talking, I had a horrible feeling that I wouldn’t believe me either. Good health of the body. That’s what the Summoning said “I still see you every day,” I said. “How can I be done I’d get; that’s what the ritual promised, right there in elab- with you if we see each other every day?” orate calligraphy, next to fame, wealth, conquest of those “That’s exactly it,” Nick said. “You don’t see me, Jenny. I should desire, and all those other fun things. Most guys You show up. You stand next to me, maybe. But you don’t would probably have paid more attention to that part; they see me at all. I’m going through one of the biggest things would have had a longer set of wishes. Pleasures of the in my life right now, maybe ever, and you didn’t even flesh, and all that. notice.” I figured the greatest pleasure your flesh could have was “The doctors. The shots,” I said. “We talked about that.” to stay put, with you still in it. I saw good health of the body, Nick sighed. Blood bubbled out of the wreck of his and I thought: It doesn’t say the body has to be mine. nose. He slumped, looking down at his hands, his shoul- My mother held my hand, when she told me. She sat ders caving over his skinny chest, and for a moment, I re- there at the kitchen table, still smoking a Marlboro, put- alized how small he really was. I never thought about it, ting it to rest in a white ashtray with a Myrtle Beach logo usually. His personality could fill a stadium. But for that on the bottom. She folded a piece of paper over and over one moment, he looked like a little boy again, as young as in her hand; they were notes, I’d realized, she was so he’d ever been, lost in the dark with blood and snot and afraid to tell me that she’d needed to write it down to get tears dripping from his face. it all the way through, and I watched the sunlight glow “Jenny,” Nick said. “My mom is dying.” blue through the rising smoke and wanted to scream. My mother loved her killer. Even after the first diagnosis, back in sixth grade, she’d just quit for a year or two, then gone and bought a pack as soon as she felt safe. Gloria Casini wrapped herself in death every day of her life, until it be- came part of her, until it twisted her own body against her, until it possessed her entirely.

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She told me what she needed to tell me — it was back, crying, and when she tried to wipe her eyes, her bloody it was bad, it was unlikely to respond to treatment — and hand left a black streak along her face. I wanted to yell at her for leaving me, to blame her for not “I guess I figured that I’d find a way out of it, before trying to stop it. She saw where my eyes were and held my anything else happened,” I said. “That there’d be a loop- hand. hole.” I know you don’t like me smoking, she’d said. But honey, Jenny sighed, cradling her ruined hand in her clean one. there’s not much point trying to quit. “So your plan — the one you risked both our lives on — She took me to the library. There was no reason to do was that you’d find some last-minute way to outsmart the anything differently, she said. She liked our routine; she Devil,” she said. “Sounds right.” wanted to enjoy it while she could. She wanted the same There it was again — that paper-cut voice, that salt life she always had, until she was too sick to live it. So she shaker and cup of lemon juice Jenny always managed to took me to the library, and I barreled into the stacks, cold hold just over my wounds, waiting for an excuse to pour. I and sweating, and I found a book I hadn’t seen before. A flinched back, suddenly furious. book that made the right promises. “You have no right to judge me,” I said. “It isn’t your mother. It isn’t your life. This didn’t happen to you.” * * * She looked at me, then, really looked at me. Her eyes had that same lost-kid-in-the-mall look I’d seen in her “What did you think would happen?” Jenny said. “When bedroom, open and defenseless against the sadness of the Omphagor came to collect?” world. “I didn’t think, Jenny,” I said. “People who make deals “You’re right,” she said. “It didn’t. I wish it hadn’t hap- with the devil usually don’t. I just wanted her to get bet- pened to you, either. I’m so sorry, Nick.” ter.” I said nothing. The air around me buzzed and vibrat- “But you knew she might die again, when the world ed, pulsing in time to the ache in my head. It hurt badly ended,” Jenny said. “We all might.” enough that I thought I might vomit, and I wondered, al- Jenny was nearly as wrecked as I was. Her hair was ratty most idly, if I was dying. Maybe this was it: No death-defy- and tangled and hanging in her face. Her dorky vanilla out- ing confrontation, no heroic finish. I’d just keel over while fit was covered in bloodstains; I could see, where her skirt processing my feelings in a high school gym. had hiked up, that the bite on her ankle was still bleeding, “The apocalypse did happen to me, though,” Jenny said. blood oozing out from a deep wound that couldn’t manage “Even if I wasn’t losing anyone before, I’m losing them to scab. She looked sweaty and tired and puffy-eyed from now. We all are.”

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I stared at my boots, suddenly very conscious of the “You two antagonize each other,” Jenny said, weakly. hole in Jenny’s hand. “I antagonize Dave,” I said. “Dave hurts me. And you let “I just don’t understand why you didn’t tell me,” she him.” said. Jenny shook her head, but there was no conviction in it. “When was I supposed to tell you?” I said. “When were I knew that I had won the argument, and that if I wanted you not busy with your boyfriend or your mom’s boyfriend to stay friends with her, I should stop talking. I didn’t stop. or your goddamn shower? You spent more time thinking Winning didn’t feel like enough any more. about how to impress some sex predator you picked up at “You think you’re so great for putting up with the rest of a food court than you did thinking about me. How was I us,” I said. “You make such a big deal out of how you help supposed to tell you anything when you were always half- Hardy. You love helping. Like, oh, high school’s so mean, way out the door?” and everyone else is so awful, and you’re Mother Theresa Jenny stiffened, and sucked her lips in, and I could tell for not calling him the r-word. But you’d never hang out the fight was going to start again. I probably wanted it to, with him.” I realized; I probably would have kept pushing that button “Who would?” Jenny asked. until the machine started, no matter what she said. “I would,” I said. “Hardy is my friend. He’s a big, weird, “You lied to me,” Jenny said. “You hurt me. You bar- gay giant, and I think he takes all his clothes off every time gained my life away like it was nothing. You flattened a he poops, and I like him very much. That’s how friendship suburb, and why? Because I had a boyfriend? Like: I kissed works.” a boy, and I didn’t ask your permission first, so now I’m Jenny blinked hard and rubbed tears out of her eyes evil and awful and you get to punish me forever. I’ve nev- with her clean hand. er made you feel bad about yourself that way. You know “You’re not Hardy,” she said. that.” “You’re right. I’m not,” I said. “Because I’m not going “How many times do you think Dave says ‘she’ when to stick around and let you tell yourself some story about he’s talking to me?” I said. “Five? Ten? How many times how tolerant and liberal you are for not beating me to death does a normal person say ‘she,’ in one conversation?” in an alley. For one thing, you did try to beat me to death, Jenny huffed a little, and rolled her eyes, and just like about five minutes ago. It’s not enough for you to not be a that, I didn’t feel that bad about her hand any more. bigot, Jennifer. You have to actually be something good.” “He knows it bugs me, Jenny,” I said. “He doesn’t know Jenny collapsed, curling in on herself and weeping into how, or why. But he sees something on my face that says her awful skirt. I knew I was hurting her. She’d hurt me, ‘stop,’ so he keeps going.” too. I knew she would cry, and need me, and I knew that

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I was supposed to feel mean for staying angry at her, to Long’s voice, these past few months, so I knew. rush back in and make everything all right again. But I “Fine,” I said. “But I’m bringing the shiv.” was tired, and bleeding, and every time I took a breath, I could feel the damage she’d done. These might be my last * * * minutes. I wasn’t going to spend them letting Jenny Long off the hook. The nurse’s office gleamed in the half-light. It was one I looked down at the mesh sleeve of my undershirt. It of the oldest rooms in the school, which had expand- was already shredded, from birds and bugs and just being ed over the years as rich alumni poured more and more a cheap, shitty thing I’d made out of a $2.99 pack of fish- money and children into it. This part was from the ‘60s, nets. It was never going to live a long life. I poked my fin- maybe, with the walls covered ominously in pale ceramic ger into one of the bigger holes and ripped the sleeve off, tile, as if the people who built it planned to do a lot of making a little wad of cloth for me to bleed into. I looked impromptu field surgery and needed an easy way to clean at Jenny’s hand, which was black and wet with blood, and up blood spatter. Only one fluorescent light had come on, ripped off the other sleeve. and it flickered, which really gave the place that haunted- “Here,” I said, shoving it at her. “Tie it around your mental-asylum quality you look for in a healthcare provid- hand. Tight, so it slows the bleeding.” er. You can blame the apocalypse, but it looked like this She did as I told her, tying the bandage around her hand even when school was open. I’d faked sick a lot, so I knew. — I realized as she did it that the fabric was so filthy I I sat on the nurse’s desk, playing with the little rub- was probably giving her blood poisoning; ah-ha, I thought, ber monsters she’d put on her pencil erasers (how fun! I revenge at last! — and it wasn’t until she finished that she imagined her thinking, what a kick! And also, why is my life spoke. like this! And when will I be allowed to die!) while Jenny rum- “Can we go to the nurse’s office?” she said. maged around behind me in the shadows at the back of “I’m not your teacher, Jenny,” I said. “You don’t need a the room. I heard the hiss of water pouring into the sink permission slip.” where she’d washed her hands. “I didn’t ask if I could go,” she said. “Your nose is bleed- “They have hydrogen peroxide,” Jenny called out. “It ing and I put a shiv through your face. I want to see if bubbles when it disinfects the wound.” there’s something we could use to bandage you up.” I kept playing with my erasers. She looked up at me through the dark. Her eyes were “I always thought that was really cool,” Jenny said. hidden in shadow, but her voice was level, with no pity I bet she did think it was really cool. Jenny Long was in it. I had gotten pretty used to detecting pity in Jenny exactly the sort of person who would have opinions about

180 181 APOCALYPSE 1999 TERROR TWILIGHT the relative coolness of household disinfectants, and would myself. I also had all that brain damage. be excited to find a bottle of her favorite one. Wow, she’d “I’m sorry it’s broken,” Jenny said. “I’m sorry that I think, hydrogen peroxide! She’d think it exactly like that, hurt you, or that I let Dave hurt you. I’m sorry he calls you with the exclamation point and everything. the wrong name. But, Nick, I don’t think your mom knows I hissed as Jenny poured extremely cool hydrogen per- your name either.” oxide over the cut on my cheekbone. Maybe I would scream again, I thought. I’d just give up “It doesn’t hurt,” she said. on language and shriek my way through the whole con- It didn’t, but I wanted her to feel bad about pouring liq- versation. I pushed myself up off of the nurse’s desk, and uids on me. Jenny picked up a pad of gauze and pressed it headed for the door. to my cut, and I reached up to hold it in place. She looked “Your mother wasn’t leaving you,” Jenny said. “She got down, peeling and snipping off little strips of tape, so that sick. She didn’t do it on purpose. I wasn’t leaving either. I she didn’t have to make eye contact. just went to the prom.” “Helping someone isn’t always an insult, you know,” “Don’t,” I said. “Don’t have insights at me. I told you Jenny said. “If you think it is, no wonder you tried to han- that you could put a Band-Aid on me, not book me on dle this alone.” Ricki Lake.” “I am alone,” I said. “My mother was leaving me. You “But you were sure someone was leaving, right?” Jenny were leaving me. I had to take care of myself.” said. “Someone was going to get rid of you. You were so “You killed yourself,” Jenny said. “So it seems like that afraid that person would stop loving you that you would didn’t work.” rather end the world.” I rubbed my jaw, testing the extent of the damage. Just I stood with my hand on the door, shaking. I knew a bad bruise, I thought; I wasn’t spitting out teeth, I could Jenny wanted to tell me things with my family would be all still move it. My nose, though, was gruesome. It was a right, the way you tell a scared kid there’s no monster un- burst star in the middle of my face, radiating waves of heat der the bed. She wanted to promise that the hard part was and agony. Jenny brushed it with her fingers, trying to get a over, because, for her, it was — because girls like her got look, and I — forgive me, reader — screamed and smacked to grow up and fit in and reminisce about the worst thing her hand away. that ever happened to them, which was being unpopular “I probably can’t fix that,” Jenny said. “I think it’s bro- in high school. ken.” “It doesn’t matter,” I said. “No matter what I feel or I shrugged, trying to regain some dignity. It wasn’t the why I feel it, people are still dying. The world is still on worst thing to happen to my head that afternoon, I told fire.”

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Jenny sighed and leaned forward onto the desk, push- end, out of the firing range of her compassion. ing a hunk of blonde hair out of her face as it fell. It was “I’m not telling you to hope,” Jenny said. “I know hope knotting together into cords, sewn together with gore and is, like, the least Goth emotion. But you believe in so gunk, and I wondered why she bothered. many things. You believe in magic and demons and black “Look,” Jenny said. “Do you remember when you blew mirrors. You could at least try to believe that you have up your trashcan?” a future worth saving.” I did. I threw a lit firecracker into it. I would tell you My head hurt so badly. Everything just hurt so badly, that it was an experiment, but the thing I was trying to and I was so tired of pretending that it didn’t hurt. I’d been find out was “can I blow up this trashcan,” and I extremely moving and talking through the pain so long. I slumped could. I had forgotten that the trashcan had a whole garage over sideways and collapsed, right on top of the Post-Its around it, and that the garage was full of used cardboard and novelty pencils and tragic decorative Garfield-themed and oily rags and other things you don’t want near explo- mouse pad. I wound up with my head in Jenny’s lap, like sions, so the next thing I knew, I was standing on my lawn, a little kid, listening to the silvery sound of water echoing crying, as the fire trucks pulled up to the curb. against the sink basin. “Fires can be put out,” Jenny said. “Even big ones. I got “I don’t want the world to end, Jenny,” I said. “I just left, a long time ago, by my Dad, but it didn’t mean my life wish the world were better.” was over. It meant that I moved across the street from you. “It’s a bad place,” Jenny said. “Dangerous on the best I’d pick you over my Dad any day.” days. But you’re not alone in it.” “You wouldn’t,” I said. “You wouldn’t lose a parent if I looked up at her, and she looked down at me, and you could help it, Jenny. No-one would.” finally, at long last, we saw each other.9 Jenny rubbed my “I would,” Jenny said. “Because my parent is a guy who shoulder with her not-gross hand. I reached up to hold it. abandoned a seven-year-old. Nobody who’s going to leave When I pulled away, a trail of dried blood came off in little you deserves you, Nick. I’m not leaving, and if your mom flecks on my palm. stuck with you when you burned her garage down, she I grabbed Jenny’s hand and held it in front of my face. probably won’t, either. But even if someone does leave, all It was black, and bloody, and dirty, and worst of all, it was that means is that we failed you. It’s not the end of your dry. story. It’s the beginning of something better. It’s leaving “You didn’t wash your hands,” I said. room for people who won’t fail.” “You killed my mom’s boyfriend,” Jenny said. “I was Jenny sat down on the edge of the desk, near the fes- Are we going to make out???? I mean, I don’t think so, be- tively despairing novelty erasers. I sat down at the other 9 cause I was there. But still. Why does this sound romantic?! — Jenny 184 185 APOCALYPSE 1999 scared to get soap in my stab wound, Nick. Just enjoy the moment.” I hauled myself up on one aching arm, looking to the shadows in the back of the room. “If you didn’t wash your hands, you didn’t use the sink,” I said. “Why is it running?” Part Four But by then, I had looked behind us, and so I knew. I drew the dagger out of my belt loop and charged for the door. “What are you doing?” Jenny asked. “Moment’s over, Jennifer,” I said. “Time to save the We’re In This world.” Together

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CHAPTER ONE everyone he knew to oblivion while convincing himself it was all a game. Possession, for Jenny Long, was selfishness. It was an idiot voice in her head repeating one phrase, over and over: What does it mean to be possessed? You’ve seen the I deserve, I deserve, I deserve. She deserved love. She deserved movies. Possession is an evil force inside you, that is not respect. She deserved pleasure. She deserved revenge. She you, that drives you. It’s a little voice in your head that deserved friendship, even if it meant leaving someone else makes you do things crueler than you ever thought your- lonely. She deserved safety, even when other people were self capable of. It’s the words coming out of your mouth unsafe. She deserved to live, and so other people deserved that horrify you, the rage that makes you say I don’t know to die. She deserved to beat her best friend into a bloody what I was thinking, the force that tenses your muscles and pulp while he wept, and fell, and tried in vain to escape curls your fist before you punch your friend. her, because he’d hurt her feelings. Yet that voice, those words, that clenched fist, are all We are all possessed, many times over: By the stories yours, too. Forget the movies; forget Linda Blair telling we’ve heard, by the secrets we’ve kept, by our own sheer priests to fuck each other and Fairuza Balk kneeling exul- bloody-minded refusal to see or deal with our problems. tant over a dead shark. Demons don’t put anything in you In Nick and Jenny’s case, someone was possessed by a de- that wasn’t already there. They find the parts of you that mon. Its name was Omphagor, and it was gnarly; if not the are ugly and destructive and cruel, and they just turn the actual Devil, then certainly the Vice-Devil, or the Speaker volume up, until those ugly tendencies drown out all the of the House of Hell. good ones. Nick and Jenny had exorcised each other, with the one Possession, for Nick Casini, was self-destruction; the tool fitted to the purpose. It was a brutal operation, and black tide sweeping him into the dark, the certainty that parts of them were lost in the process; they always are. he had nothing left to lose. It was the force that drove him Yet, as Nick and Jenny left the nurse’s office that night, over and over to the same sheet of Xeroxed paper, repeat- some wall between them dissolved, and they began shar- ing the lethal words on it, heedless of who he might hurt, ing the same story. not even caring if he hurt or killed himself, so long as he In that story, it made no sense for some hugging and could feel in control. Possession told Nick Casini that he a few life lessons to dispatch something as powerful as was the smartest boy alive, no matter how lost he looked, Omphagor. and no matter how lost he felt, and so he could do anything Sometimes a demon is just your flaws getting louder. he wanted; possession allowed Nick to damn himself and Sometimes. Mostly. But sometimes — like if the summon-

188 189 APOCALYPSE 1999 WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER ers repeat the same ritual twenty or thirty times in a row, two untouched male virgins. Me and Hardy.” and if there’s an especially pliable host body in the vicin- “Hardy? Really?” ity, and if you’re summoning a truly powerful entity, the Jenny was good at some things — reading, hiding, Vice-Devil of Hell Itself, the World-Eater, Omphagor — avoiding conflict; if there was no-one around to hear her, sometimes you really do get the classic pea-soup routine, she could sing about half of Cats — but one thing she could something inhuman using your face as a Halloween mask not do well was fake surprise. to go trick-or-treating. Sometimes a demon possesses you “Men don’t have to screw everything in sight to be men, whole, and entire, and drives any last trace of the human Jenny,” Nick said. “Virginity has its uses.” out. Nick and Jenny had been possessed slowly, corrupting “I hope I used mine while I had the chance,” Jenny said. themselves and each other, but that was not the problem. Nick threw a glance back at her. He suspected her of While they were subtly becoming worse people, someone rubbing it in, if only a little, but she was trying to rub it on else had gone the full Linda. a version of him that wanted to date Dave, and that was never going to stick. Dave was handsome, but there was * * * something cold about it. You looked at his features, and they were perfect, but there was nothing there. “Why do you even have a shiv, anyway?” Jenny asked. “So who are you supposed to shiv?” Jenny said. “If I’m “It feels like I should have asked that earlier.” not possessed, and you’re not possessed…” “It’s a mystic dagger,” Nick said. “The only thing that “I think we were, a little,” Nick said. “I feel different can slay the demon.” now. Clearer. Like I can think with my whole head. Don’t “Oh, wow,” Jenny said. “Did you borrow it from Buffy you?” the Vampire Slayer?” Jenny squinted off into the distance, feeling around the It was strange how quickly normalcy re-asserted itself. inside of her own head, as if she were testing for a loose Within a few seconds of walking down the fluorescent-lit tooth with her tongue. halls of their old high school, their bodies had somehow “I think so,” she said, “I mean, I don’t feel as much like snapped into place, lulled by familiarity. They loped along beating people to death.” next to each other, Jenny half-limping on her wounded an- Nick privately felt that the phrase “as much” was a kle, Nick adjusting his pace almost unconsciously to keep point of concern — “murderer” vs. “not murderer” was her by his side. They might as well have been walking up one of the few cases where he favored a strong binary; he to the counter at Starbucks. was also weirded out by that thing in Pittsburgh where “I made it, in fact.” Nick said. “It had to be forged by they put fries on sandwiches — but, though a moral lesson

190 191 APOCALYPSE 1999 WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER could definitely be gleaned here, it was not a lesson that Wait. Stop. Let me tell this part. should be delivered by a guy who recently damned human- ity to eternal torment to avoid talking about his feelings. Hardy, we’re doing something now. It’s the end of the Jenny tacked left, past the atrium, and into the chip- story, and there’s already been one major stylistic shift. I board forest of the cafeteria. In the back of the atrium, don’t think anyone will be able to process near the windows, Nick spotted a ring of burnt-out can- dles and wondered for a moment what she had been trying You told me to come back. I came. But you to do. Another ritual, maybe, though that wasn’t like her. have to let me tell my own story. “Well,” Nick said, “at least I stopped you before you actually killed anybody.” Are you sure, Hardy? I mean, it’d be understandable if It took Nick a few seconds to realize that Jenny had you just didn’t want to revisit stopped walking. When he looked back, she was staring at the linoleum cafeteria floor. Her eyes were dark and hol- Yes. You’ve been able to tell your side of low. She knitted her hands together, locking and unlocking things. This is my side. This is what I came to tell. her fingers. “You didn’t stop me,” Jenny said. “Not in time. We killed Debra.” Nick stared at her, temporarily at a loss. “No, you didn’t,” Nick said. Jenny nodded. She looked sick. “Debra. Billy. Chris,” Jenny said. “I think some other people at the supermarket. The idea was just to hurt them, but some of them got really, really hurt, you know? So you didn’t stop me. I did every bad thing I was going to do.” “Wait,” Nick said. “Who’s ‘w

Stop.

Sorry. What?

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— INT E R L U D E — messy hair that glinted red under the light. He was attrac- tive. Strikingly so. I thought maybe the end of the world CHAPTER ∞ was about to improve for me. Last man on earth, and all that. I didn’t have to place him. He placed me. As he rose to his feet, dusting himself off, he narrowed his eyes and gave me a long look that must have been recognition. Hardy “Wait,” Dave said. “Are you Jenny Long’s friend, Har- dy?” Jenny was not my friend. Nick was. Jenny was conspicu- I ran along the halls as fast as I could, but I didn’t know ously nice to me to prove she was not a bully. I didn’t think what I was running to, or why. If Nick was dead then we my potential first sexual partner would want to waste time were both dead. He had the only dagger. I was moving parsing those distinctions. because I’d been told to move, and when I realized that, I “Yes,” I said. stopped. Dave turned and walked away from me. People often Dave was running, and that’s why I knocked him down. did that, so I stayed put. Dave turned around at the last He came around a corner without looking and slammed moment. straight into my chest. He was carrying a flashlight in one “Follow me,” he said. “We’ll be safer in the kitchen.” hand. It went flying. So did he. I have attempted to be very clear on my thought pro- I didn’t know he was Dave. I had not met Dave. I was cess. I hope you can see why I followed. surprised to see another person awake, and it kept me from asking certain questions. * * * “Who are you?” he said, squinting up at me from the floor. Dave leaned against the silver wall of cabinets. His long “Hardy Patrick,” I said. legs were crossed at the ankle. His arms were crossed “Is that a name?” Dave said. “Or are you saying your across his chest. There is a certain sort of man who can name backward? Like, are you Patrick Hardy, and it says lean well on things. I was not one of them, but I was very ‘Hardy, Patrick’ on your driver’s license?” familiar with what they looked like, because I noticed “I’m Hardy Patrick,” I said. “It’s unfortunate. On many them, exhaustively, when they started leaning. levels.” I looked down at Dave’s high-tops and was quiet. I was I was trying to place him. Orange t-shirt, green eyes, usually quiet. It hides a lot.

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The faucet was dripping behind me. I could hear the the pipes to flood. hollow metallic splat of each droplet resonating slightly I was thinking about fluid dynamics when he reached against the sides. It was the only sound in the room for a me. long time. “Hardy,” Dave said, standing very close to me, “who is “So this is Hardy,” Dave said. “You know, I bet Jenny your friend?” thinks you’re dead?” “His name is Nick,” I said. “I’m not dead,” I said. “You mean…” Dave nodded. I realized that I was expected to add val- He said the wrong name. I didn’t like it. Even on acci- ue to the conversation. dent, it felt like a violation. It seemed clear to me, though, “I got bitten by rats,” I said. “A mailman. I swallowed that it was not an accident. Dave made the connection too a bee. Some cockroaches. The bees stung me in my face. easily. He was using the wrong name because he knew it Birds hit me in the face and body. I got broken glass in my was wrong. rat bites.” “I mean Nick,” I said. I held up my bandaged arms to show him. The structur- The noise in the sink didn’t make sense. It sounded like al integrity of the bandages was not holding up. My body a very full basin of water sloshing. It sounded denser than was popped open and oozing out, and it was bloody. water. Milk, maybe. Oil. There was a thick sound that im- “Not dead, though,” I concluded. plied viscosity. I kept looking at Dave. “It would take a lot to kill you,” Dave said. “Full points “People’s identities are complex,” I said. for that. So what brings you here, Hardy?” “You’re telling me,” Dave said, smiling that strange “I came with my friend,” I said. “We made a dagger.” smile again. It looked like the skin of his face was being Dave smiled up at me. It was a wide smile. It had more peeled away from his teeth. Like he was forcing his own teeth than smiles usually do. For a second, I thought, it body to react to him. I understood the feeling. almost looked uncomfortable. I wanted to look at the sink very badly. I know I don’t “A dagger, huh?” Dave said. seem vulnerable in ordinary ways. You probably can’t Dave stopped leaning. He walked across the kitchen to imagine me crying, or needing my mother, or having a bad where I stood. I hardly even noticed. In that moment, all I dream. I still did all those things. I recognized the feeling could hear was the splat, splat, splat of the dripping faucet. I was having now from the bad dreams: Being so afraid The sound of impact was wetter, now. Like the sink was you were stuck in place. I was trying to turn my head, to filling up. That should not have been possible. The drains see the source of the noises — now there was bubbling, a didn’t close. The only way for the sink to fill would be for sound of liquid mass shifting or being shifted, air or gas

196 197 APOCALYPSE WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER being introduced somehow — but I could not. My eyes ping in the blood. I was not a coordinated person. Maybe stayed fixed on Dave as he leaned against the counter next I should have been. Maybe I could have learned to be. I to me, nearly as tall as I was, and close enough to touch. should have taken fencing. Touching Dave had seemed exciting a moment ago. Dave kept smiling and speaking in his reasonable voice Now, for reasons I could not name, he was no longer hand- and moving toward me. I knew that when he touched me some. The part of me that craved human connection did something terrible would begin to happen. not crave him. “No,” I tried saying. “No.” “Have you ever been in love, Hardy?” Dave smile-con- He smiled and smiled and did not listen. vulsed up at me. “I had hoped to keep some of Jenny’s old life around,” He took a step toward me. I took a step back. Then my he said. “Something to comfort her through all these sneaker slipped, and I fell backward, into the bad noise. changes. But I have to counterbalance that with the camp- Looking up from the floor, I could see it clearly. The sinks, site rule. Do you know that rule, Hardy?” the drain on the floor, every pipe and orifice in the room “I’m eighteen years old,” I said. was bubbling and overflowing with blackish-red blood. It was important for him to know. Eighteen, and going to New York in the fall, and if I just made it through these * * * last three months, my eighteen years of being laughed at and excluded and hit in the head with drink cups would be “I love Jenny,” the thing inside Dave said. “I know it over, and I would have a better future than anyone I knew. seems unlikely. But I do.” “Please,” I said. “I’m eighteen.” His tone had not changed. I was never a strong reader Dave leaned over me where I lay on the floor. This is the of tones, but this one was not threatening. He sounded part where he picks me up, I thought. Then his smile got big- casual. He was still smiling. We were friends, and he was ger. It was so big I thought it would rip his face apart, like talking to me about his girlfriend, as friends often do. a zipper coming open. I knew then he wouldn’t help me. The blood on the floor was at least two or three inches “You leave someone better than you found them,” Dave deep. It was gushing up fast from the drain on the floor. It said. “Like a campsite. Isn’t that clever?” was getting deeper. He brought his knee down into my gut and pinned me “You know how it is when you love someone,” Dave to the floor. I knew myself to be big. I was a big, strong said. “You walk into someone’s life. You’re a stranger. All man, the sort of person who was traditionally okay in you want to do is to make that life better.” these situations. Dave was tall, too, however, and as his I tried to get up and could not. My sneakers kept slip- knee dug into my abdomen I realized he was heavier than I 1999 APOCALYPSE 1999 WE’RE IN THIS TO GETHER anticipated. Dave might be the first person I had met who The first rat came for my face. was almost as big and as strong as I was. I didn’t go to New York. I didn’t become a lecturer at “Almost;” “mostly;” “sort of;” qualifiers. I avoided a university. I didn’t do anything at all. I just died. I bled, them. I had been taught they weakened a sentence. Now I and I suffered, and I was only eighteen years old, and my thought of sentences with qualifiers in them.Dave is almost last words were: Not yet. as big as Hardy. Hardy is mostly un-injured. Dave is somewhat Not yet. Not yet. Because it was unfair, and it was aw- human. Qualifiers, I realized too late, were the most im- ful, and I never hurt anyone, and he was never sorry about portant words. hurting me. Nick is a necromancer, a word meaning magi- Then I heard the metal of the floor grate dislodging it- cian who commands the dead, and he asked me here to speak self, and I realized what the source of the bubbling had to you, and here I am. But I am not. I am only this voice, been. Blood had been pumping into the room, but some- a thin shred of who Hardy Patrick was, that goes back and thing had been breathing and moving through it. With the forth over the moment of his death, forever. I never get blood had come the rats. out. It always ends here, on the floor, with Dave smiling The first rat to climb out of the sink edged its way along down at me. the counter and looked at me. I looked at it. I could see the So I came to tell you that. I came to tell you that I died blood reflecting in its eyes. I could see that another rat was young. I was wasted. I came to finish saying it: Not yet. A poking its way through the floor drain and heading along death like mine should not happen, not to someone that the floor toward me. young, not to anyone, not ever. “I’m thinking about how I can improve Jenny Long,” I should have told you that at the beginning. I’m Dave said. “How can I clean up the campsite that is her? sorry. This was never the kind of story where all of the And you know what I think she needs, Hardy?” good people were going to live. All I had to do was live for three more months. I closed my eyes and thought of it: The city. The only city, towers of glass and bright fall air and a thousand bookstores. Whole buildings full of people just like me, smart like me, strange like me, welcoming me home. Nick had to burst through the door. Dave had to make some fatal error. Then I would live. I knew I would live, I knew it. I could see the glass world waiting. “I think she needs better friends,” Dave said.

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CHAPTER TWO trying to make her save herself. “Beetlejuice,” Jenny whispered. “We don’t need to summon another one, Jenny,” Nick said. “We need to run.” The blood flowed out from the kitchen in an awesome So they did. Dave looked after them, unbothered. Above wave. Dave stepped through the knee-high flood, his blue him, the ceiling sprinklers began spraying blood into the jeans soaked black with blood. His hands were dripping hallways of the school, staining the world red. Dave stood with it. The rest of Dave was clean. It was something under the shower, smiling and spotless, as if he was never you’d notice, if you ever looked closely at him, which no- really there. one ever did: Dave did not get dirty. He did not get hurt. He was like a picture of a man superimposed on reality, * * * gliding through it, while everyone else had to deal with its hard-edged furniture and gravity and dust. I missed it, Nick thought. Jenny was stumbling behind The picture-perfect man turned to Nick and Jenny, him. He was yanking her along by the strap of her tank where they stood, frozen, in the center of the cafeteria. He top, hard enough that he thought he might rip it. Jenny smiled with all his teeth. had frozen again; a rabbit in the headlights, a rat staring at There were too many of them, now that Jenny thought the cobra that danced in her mind’s eye. Nick was some- of it. They probably shouldn’t have been pointed. one who could keep running, so he ran for them both. “Hi, Jenny,” he said. “Hi, Jenny’s friend.” But he was smart. Right? He was a smart guy, or he’d Jenny stood, silent, feeling the story of her first great thought he was, and he had studied this demon from ev- love turn itself inside-out. Wow, she thought, crazily. It re- ery angle, learned its secret names and its history and its ally is like Buffy. Or Scream. Or Dracula. She stood there, place in Hell, and he had stood two feet away from it in a marveling, almost insulted by the obviousness of her own suburban mall and not known to be anything but pissed. life. The glamour coming off Dave was blinding, like a lens Not the book Dracula? But the Winona Ryder movie. It’s like a flare. It kept you from seeing him. That’s all Omphagor lot of Winona Ryder movies, actually. was, really: It was glamour. It was status. It was power. For Jenny’s mind rattled on in a list of references and sim- one brief, life-affirming moment, Nick was grateful for the iles and metaphors for the thing right in front of her, and fact that he’d always had objectively shitty taste. The Devil while it was doing so, Jenny could not move. She felt Nick’s couldn’t tempt him with the finer things in life, because he hot, bony hand pulling at her, shaking her by the shoulder, preferred Hot Topic.

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The gray industrial carpet of the school was soaked you know?” through with blood. It squelched up in gouts under Nick’s Nick yanked the both of them around a random cor- boots. The sprinklers kept spraying it down around them, ner, hoping that, if they had no advantage in speed, the what felt like whole slaughterhouses’ worth of carnage. unpredictability of their path might throw Dave off. Jenny The pipes were flooded; it lapped like a spreading pool stopped short and grabbed him by the shoulder, so hard from beneath the doors of the bathrooms and bubbled out he nearly fell. of every sink. As Nick watched, a water fountain bubbled, “Your friend, though,” Dave said, his pleasant voice then exploded off the wall. echoing around the corner. “Your friend, I don’t really care Jenny turned her head and threw her hand up, warding about earning.” the shrapnel off. In that moment, she saw Dave standing Nick looked at her, furious, and for once, unable to say at the end of the hallway. so. Jenny stared at the face of her salvation: The opened He wasn’t angry, and he wasn’t running. He just am- door of a supply closet. bled toward them at the same pace as ever, calm and rea- sonable, except that somehow, even though he’d seemed * * * very far away at first, he was gaining ground. “I think this is an overreaction,” Dave said. There’s a common fantasy among kids — you’ve had Jenny chose to believe her reaction was appropriate, this one, right? — that the inside of their school conceals and began running. Her skirt was wet and weighted down a hidden world. You know that there are rooms you’re not with blood. She’d be better off stripping down to her un- permitted to enter; teachers’ lounges, back offices, janito- derwear and fleeing naked, but she didn’t want to parse rial supply stations. It’s easy to infer that there must be the implications for feminism. Nick huffed along behind a whole second school inside the school, a hidden night her, burdened by the dead weight of his enormous, soaked- world of corridors and secret rooms, connecting the thing through JNCO jeans. together; that if you could just find the right access point, Dear God, Jenny thought, please don’t let us be killed by these you’d be led along some secret maze, seeing the backstage clothes. Having to wear them was bad enough. darkness behind the lit stage of classrooms and gymnasi- Dave followed along, walking at his own cool and steady ums and cafeterias. pace, faster than anyone else in the room. That fantasy, as it happens, is absolutely true, and Jen- “I’m not going to hurt you, Jenny,” he said. “I mean, I ny Long, the one girl in Ohio who knew how true it was, could. At a certain point, the Stockholm syndrome would was saved that day by her own willingness to believe. She set in, and you’d forgive me. But that wouldn’t feel earned, dragged Nick through the supply closet, past the rackety

204 205 APOCALYPSE 1999 WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER metal shelves, to the hidden access door in the far back flooded waist-high with blood. It lapped and bubbled in corner of the room. It was unlocked, and she opened it as front of them, as far as they could see, like a hidden ocean silently as she could, dragging Nick down the hidden stair- beneath the world. case and toward the school’s basement. Jenny took a breath and headed out into the gore, wad- He followed her down, trying to pick his way through ing in until it soaked through the waistband of her skirt the darkness by the distant glare of the safety lights below. and to her belly. Nick hung back, appalled, and a little jeal- “Can’t he find us down here?” Nick whispered. ous that he hadn’t been the first to take the risk. Jenny “We’re not staying,” Jenny said. “The basement is open- looked back at him over her shoulder, her long hair trailing plan. We can cut across toward an exit and leave the school in the murk. in a place he doesn’t expect.” “If we walk left far enough,” she said, “we’ll come up “How do you even know all this?” Nick asked. under the auditorium. We can head out through the side “I used to sneak around in supply closets,” Jenny said. doors, like we did for graduation.” “God. Twelve years of public school, and the most useful Nick nodded, wading in behind her. He expected the thing I learned was how the closets worked.” blood to be cold, like entering a swimming pool on an ear- “I also learned a lot about closets in high school, if I ly morning; he was braced for it, the chill that made your recall,” Nick said. muscles clench and try to propel you out of the water as Jenny paused, squinting out into the dark. They were fast as possible. But it was warm, of course. Blood always near the bottom of the stairs now, though still not close is unless it’s congealed. enough to see what was waiting for them. Nick peered “So where does all this stuff come from?” Jenny asked. over her shoulder, watching her face. She was wading out ahead of him in the dark, made “I know you’re being extra nice to me,” he said, “so I’m unexpectedly slow and graceful by the viscosity of the not even going to point out that I was right.” blood. The thick, ratty denim of Nick’s jeans billowed and “Right about what?” Jenny said absently, scanning the dragged behind him. Above them, he could hear the faint darkness. creak of the ceiling tiles, weakened by the flood. “Your boyfriend is a force of pure malice, spawned in “What do you mean?” Nick said. “It comes from Satan.” the fathomless abyss before the dawn of time,” Nick said. “I mean, is it Satan’s blood?” Jenny said. “Did he do- “He’s way too old to be dating a teenager.” nate it, with an IV and everything? Is this what happens to They had taken the last few steps down the stairs, by the rats when Dave’s done with them? Blood comes from that time, and by now they saw it: The whole basement, inside a body, Nick. How do you get enough of it to fill a what felt like acres of vacant concrete-floored space, was basement?”

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You got it by being really spooky, was what Nick thought, — INTERLUDE — and he regretted, not for the first time that day, that no- one in central Ohio was willing to cross the threshold into Beeing the True Gospel of a mythic world. “The rat thing sounds right,” Nick said. “I mean, that, OMPHAGOR or humanity has finally failed to save the dolphins.” General of Hell’s Greater Forces, Fiend of Fiends, “Oh, that’s terrible,” Jenny said. “After we boycotted Devourer of Worlds and Hopes, the tuna for them in fourth grade and everything.” Your Boyfriend Then it caught him. The blood was black and opaque in For that I am beside you, and in you, and always with the darkness, so Nick couldn’t see the thing that had gotten you; for that I have placed myself in your heart’s deep- wrapped around his boot; an extension cord, he thought, est regions; for that I watch from behind your eyes, or a fire hose, or just some tentacle the school had grown breathe your breath, and in this manner was forced to sit in a sudden desperate attempt to make sure he’d die there. through your whole graduation; for this, you will know me, He was tangled in it, anyway; he had stepped into a slip- OMPHAGOR. knot and tightened it around his ankle. For that I have lifted you above mortal women; for that He yanked his foot up and forward a few times, and it the love I bear you is great, and other love can only dilute only got tighter, cutting into his heel through the leather it; for that I know you long for surrender, and the pleasure of his boot. He was going to have to get down on his knees, surrender brings; for this reason I shall cleanse the world of he realized, or actually stick his head under the surface, all but Myself, that you will turn to Me alone. and even then, he wouldn’t be able to see, so he wouldn’t For I have watched at each step, as a Blade of silence know what he was doing. The best thing to do was to take and secrecy, a thing I cannot see, is formed. For I have off the boot. That boot had twenty-seven buckles onit, tried as I may to halt its creation, but only managed to and went all the way up to Jesus; it would take time to set kill the same volleyball player twice. For you seek with a himself free. child’s willfulness to reject the generosity I have shown, and children must be disciplined by those who have grown Nick called Jenny’s name, in the dark, and she turned to wisdom; to him. So she saw it happen. Nick knelt down, forgetting For this I bring you suffering, and darkness, and the the ever-present creak of the soaked-though ceiling, and it grief beyond speaking. For there is no thing to lose but collapsed, coming down on top of him in a gout of tile and this world you have, and what good, Jennifer, is that world dislodged plaster, knocking him face-down into the blood. to you? When all else is gone, who will you belong to, if not to me?

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CHAPTER THREE touched him, and not known the answer to that question; it was as if her mind had substituted the abstract idea of A Handsome Man for whatever it was she’d actually been seeing. It had never occurred to her to question that, just Jenny limped into the auditorium alone. Tears streaked like it had never occurred to her — Nick Casini, Debra McAl- through the blood that covered her face from when she’d lister, Hardy Patrick, she counted the facts like rosary beads gone under the surface for Nick, tried and failed to yank — that Dave did not have a last name. him loose. Every part of her dripped with carnage. Her “What do you look like?” Jenny asked the thing stand- eyes were empty. ing on the stage. Jenny stood high up, near the projection booth, her “Whatever you want,” Omphagor said. “Isn’t that the breath still in her chest, trying not to inhale or shudder. point?” She was looking down on hundreds of gathered bodies It smiled up at her, with teeth that she was used to tell- that filled the seats of the auditorium. They looked away ing herself were perfect. from her in the darkness and did not move. Jenny looked away. She had wanted to see beauty, that Dave smiled up at her from the stage. was true, and she had wanted it badly. She was so used “You see,” he said. “I’m not going to lose you, Jenny.” to ugly men; her mother’s men, middle-aged and shy and He was sitting on a folding chair, under a spotlight, sad, men with wire-framed glasses and bad mustaches and leaning back with his legs crossed and his long arms dan- receding hairlines, men who smelled of the Camels they gling to his side. He looked almost theatrically casual, like kept in the pockets of their polo shirts. She had grown it was important for her to know that what she thought up with those men, coming in and out of her life, leav- wasn’t important. He always looked like that, Jenny real- ing cigarette butts and wreckage, and she had told herself ized, and Nick had been right: It was irritating. More so, love would be different for her. When it was her time, she when you knew he was a mass murderer. would escape into the arms of someone beautiful. Now The spotlight carved new shadows in his face and made she had, and all she wanted was to get back out again. the red lights in his hair gleam, so bright they looked like A dozen hands seized her, making her wince where sparks of flame. Exactly like sparks of flame, actually. As they gripped her bruises. The shadowy figures in the seats Jenny squinted down at Dave, it occurred to her that she loomed over her. Some of them, Jenny knew. Courtney didn’t actually know what color his hair was. Was it blonde Scheiber in torn flannel and rings of eyeliner, her snarl gone with red in it, or was it dark brown with auburn highlights, slack and vacant; Tyler Cord, with his ruined face; Trevor or was he actually redheaded? She had looked right at him, Murphy, creaking a little in his black pleather trenchcoat.

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Their eyes were empty, and their hands had the strength look in them any more. to tear her to pieces, and she knew, with deep dread, that “Where’s [DEAD]?” it said. every one of them was a person like herself, who wanted “His name’s Nick,” Jenny said. to live. “[DEAD] had the dagger,” Omphagor said, not quite The sleepwalkers passed her down to the stage — shov- patiently. “You tell me: Where is [DEAD]?” ing and grabbing and pulling her forward, with a force that “Why do you hate him so much?” Jenny asked. “You reminded her she would be easy to rip apart. Omphagor hate him, and you love me. What’s the difference between extended a hand to help her up the final steps, and she us?” took it. It was ice cold, and Jenny wondered, horrified, if Omphagor grimaced and shook its head. The gesture he’d been this cold every time he touched her. If he’d been was almost human. hurting her, this whole time, without her knowing. “Hate is mortal,” it said. “It’s too small for what I am. “What happened to Dave?” Jenny whispered. “The real Your friend is just very self-possessed. I can’t work with Dave. If there ever was one.” that. You, you’re more…vacant, I guess?” “There was a man,” Omphagor said. “He didn’t use that Vacant. There it was. Her boyfriend hadn’t loved her, name. I got this off a sticker on his car. He was the sort of and though Jenny ought to know better, and her heart had guy who’d have that car, Jenny. He was a waste of a good already been broken in several places that day, it still cut face. The world is better off.” through her to know she had not been loved. “Better off without him, you mean,” Jenny said. “You’re “I don’t mean it as an insult,” it said. “You’re receptive. not sharing his body with him? The only person in there You want someone to tell you who you are. I can tell you, is you?” if you’ll let me.” “I’ve never been a person,” Omphagor said. “And this is “So who am I?” Jenny asked. my body now.” “Special,” the Devil replied. “Soon, you’ll be the wealth- Jenny looked at the dead man in front of her, feeling iest, most famous, most beloved person in the world. Be- a terror so deep it was nearly sorrow. She realized she’d cause you’ll be the only person in it. Isn’t that a wish worth been right: She wasn’t a girl who cried easily any more. If granting?” she were, she’d be in hysterics now. It was true, Jenny thought. She had wanted to be spe- Omphagor closed in on Jenny, looking down at her cial. She had wanted a stage and a crowd and a voice worth with an intensity she’d used to mistake for romantic. hearing. She had wanted to be something, because she was Maybe his eyes were so green they seemed to glow. May- unformed, less a person than a place where a person might be they glowed. Either way, Jenny knew enough not to one day happen. She was a child, and Omphagor had cho-

212 213 APOCALYPSE 1999 WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER sen her because it was a creature that went looking for The one guy in our school with a football scholarship, the children to use. one everyone thought was going to go pro? But he was Yet she was not empty. And so Jenny Long decided to incredibly nice to everyone, even to Nick and me, and he take her unformed self and twist it into a shape that she got higher SAT scores than I did. I saw them. Cara Gray recognized. Jenny decided, for the first time in her life, to was going to Juilliard, and she was in every single theater give a bully a devastating speech. production, and Nick and I used to find her so irritating. “Debra McAllister loved Jesus,” Jenny said. But I heard her sing ‘I Dreamed A Dream’ at choir recital, The Devil looked down at her, coolly. and I cried. She deserved it. The world deserved to hear “I’m not as weak as people think, Jenny,” it said. “That Cara Gray sing. Hardy Patrick.” name doesn’t frighten me.” “You have a story about Hardy Patrick,” Omphagor said. “What name? Debra?” Jenny said. “It should. Debra The sound in its voice was a laugh. It swept through her frightened a lot of people. She was cruel, and she made life like a sickness, reminding her of things that she couldn’t worse for the people around her. But people were cruel to take back. her, too, because the world is like that for girls, and deep “I don’t,” Jenny said. “I wish I had one. I think Nick down, when she was alone with herself, what she wanted probably had hundreds. I wish that I had known Nick’s to believe was that God would reward her if she helped friend.” people.” “[DEAD],” Omphagor said. “Your friend is [DEAD].” Jenny took a step forward. “My friend is Nick Casini,” Jenny said. “He loved Mar- “Billy Kilpatrick volunteered weekends at an animal ilyn Manson, and Nine Inch Nails, and he thought there shelter,” Jenny said. “I saw him once outside of Kroger’s, were redeeming things about Korn. He said the drums in doing a fundraiser. He was awful to people, but he loved ‘Freak on a Leash’ were good, and they kind of are, in the puppies. Some part of him wanted to care for helpless chorus. He burned down his own garage once and he bare- things. Chris Swartz took advanced science classes. I think ly even got grounded. He spent fifty dollars at the drug he might have been smart or something. Chris could have store on Halloween so he’d have enough grease paint to been a scientist, or a doctor, and even though he hurt peo- look dead for the rest of the year.” ple in high school, he might have saved people, if he lived.” Jenny kept moving toward Omphagor, and Omphagor Jenny walked forward, into the thing that she had loved kept edging back, away from her. Something was building an hour ago. It edged backward and away from her. in Jenny, made of the best parts of her and the worst, and “Brent Cherry was going to OSU on a football scholar- in the end, even the Devil knew there was only one thing ship,” Jenny said, “and you’d think he’d be a jerk, right? to do when Jenny Long was angry. You could witness her.

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Or you could duck. CHAPTER FOUR “Nick made arm warmers out of fishnets,” Jenny said. “He never cleaned his room. He went to the library with his mom every Sunday, and he loved it. His mom and the library. He loved them both. He never let someone feel NICK helpless or worthless or powerless in his presence. He never said something behind your back he wouldn’t say to Oh, come on. Are you surprised? Every “we” is an “I” your face. He had more to be afraid of than any of us, and in hiding.1 I told you from the beginning what to expect he never let fear stop him. Even with the whole world fall- of me: I’m a necromancer, a summoner of demons, a Gem- ing apart around him, he was thinking about who needed ini, and more important than all of that, I’m the guy who help and who he could save.” stabbed the Devil in the neck when he wasn’t looking. Omphagor had backed up so far that it was nearly at the Jenny saw the thing that had been Dave as she was climb- edge of the stage, creeping out of the spotlight and into ing up from the basement. I was still behind her, brushing the darkness of the wings. Jenny followed her first love plaster from my hair; yes, I’d been hit on the head, again, into the dark. but my head had given up protesting by that point. I was “You tell me I matter,” Jenny said, “but what you mean still conscious, mostly because going into a coma would be is that no-one else does. Everybody matters. Everyone was too much work. So, in the roughly three thousand hours it more than we knew. Every single person you killed was had taken me to get my boot off, we’d scraped together a so important that someone, somewhere, would risk the plan, found my last-minute way to outsmart the Devil: She world to save them. Every time we lose someone, a world went around to the front of the house, and I hid backstage, ends, and my world was Nick Casini. He was brave, and he hoping that the weird laser focus Omphagor kept on Jenny was good, and he was important, and he’s standing right would protect me. She just had to provide that one crucial behind you, and —” distraction long enough to back him up into me. Omphagor tried to turn. But it was too late. He (I) was. The speech was her idea. I didn’t know she had it in her. It was also her idea to ask if the original Dave was still in there; maybe it’s shameful to admit this, in retrospect, but I was ready to just stab him. Even if exorcising him 1 Some readers may wonder why I did not get to be the “I” in hiding — I haven’t even gotten to narrate since the middle of Part Three, in fact — but what can I say? I guess there just aren’t enough books written from the male perspective. — Jenny 216 217 APOCALYPSE 1999 WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER somehow restored him to full Dave-ness, at least some of I was hoping I wore it better. those flaws had been in there to begin with, and I didn’t “You look horrible,” Jenny said. really feel like risking my life to save some transphobic “Thank you,” I said. “Did you mean what you said about statutory rapist we found outside a Claire’s. So Jenny is a me?” hero too, if you doubted it; that soft heart the world sank “I did,” she said. into, her ability to care obsessively about every tiny little “You look like Old Navy put out a line for Mormon sis- thing that ever happened to her, saved us both. I also got ter wives,” I said, “but you’re okay.” to hear her say a lot of nice things about me, which helped We stood together in the ruins of our teenage life, look- a lot with the day I’d been having. Awww, she really does care, ing at all the ways it had destroyed us. We were still our- I was thinking, as Jenny finished harshly critiquing the de- selves, somewhere underneath. The catastrophe of our fi- mon’s worldview, and the Devil — Dave? — the Dave-il nal day had been bloody, but blood is just dirt, and dirt came within arm’s reach. I rammed the mystic shiv into washes off. The end of the world had come and gone, Jen- the soft spot below its ear. ny and I were still standing, and for the first time, I really It wheeled around and backhanded me, and for one mo- knew that we would survive, rather than just hoping. I ment — not long, but long enough to count — I saw what began to smile. its face really looked like. I won’t tell you my hair went Then the corpse exploded. Have you ever crushed a white, or anything, but I still have the nightmares. Jenny Coke can in your fist, after you drank it? That’s kind of pulled the shiv out of its neck and stabbed her boyfriend what happened to Dave, when Omphagor was done with directly in the eye. It was like ramming a fork really hard him. You’d have to imagine that the Coke can was full of into Jell-O. As she pulled the blade out, I could see bits of bones and innards, though, because those came out, with that poor stoner’s rented-out brain were stuck to it. It was great force. We were standing right over it. like something out of Event Horizon. So, yes: The blood on Jenny and I would wash off, even- That seemed to do it. Dave’s corpse, newly void of Om- tually. But it was going to take a lot of washing. phagor, fell steaming and hissing to the floor. Jenny and I stared at each other over the body. She * * * was drenched in blood and muck, and — a little, on her face — her ex-boyfriend’s eye jelly. It was rough. Mean- The town regained consciousness slowly, then all at while, I had recently been knocked out by a swarm of fly- once. People filed out of the stage doors in the auditori- ing cockroaches, beaten within an inch of my life, stabbed um for the second time in twenty-four hours, bloody and in the face, and knocked bodily under a sea of blood, but filthy and mostly silent. Sure, it didn’t look great for us to

218 219 APOCALYPSE 1999 WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER be caught, gore-soaked and dagger-wielding, over a dead about it; she’d unwound the bandage, and shown it to me, body — fucking Trenchcoat Mafia, I heard someone whisper and the stitches had healed into a cool, jagged scar. She’d as they bumped past me — but everyone had woken up been on some weapons-grade antibiotics, for a while, not in a place they didn’t remember walking to, some with to mention the rabies shots, because she really did get ev- suspicious stains on their hands or the taste of raw meat ery possible kind of dirt in that wound. Her face had gotten in their mouths. It was in our best interest to keep each leaner, during the illness, or maybe it had just settled into others’ secrets. Everyone has things they’d prefer to forget itself. Her eyes were sharper, and sadder, and you could about high school. begin to see the adult she was becoming. So it was, not quite four weeks later, that Jenny and I was becoming, too, though in my case what I was be- I found ourselves sitting, scarred and beaten but still coming was a dude with a busted nose. You could see it breathing, on the bench in the courtyard of what was once swerve, not badly, but distinctively, halfway up the bridge; Easton. in a few years, people would say Wilson brother, but right All of the stores were closed. Not even Arnold now, they just said broken. The cut along my cheekbone Schwarzenegger could make people show up to what that was going to scar. Still, the black eyes and bruises had gone mall had become. The glass ceiling had completely shat- down, and I’d cut my own hair that summer, in a burst of tered down into the central building. Fires had burnt out confidence, and then shaved most of it off, when that con- big chunks of it; a helicopter had crashed into the roof of fidence had proven to be misplaced; I won’t go into it all, the Virgin Megastore, where it still stuck halfway out, its but I was liking more about how I looked. propeller blades silhouetted like dragonfly wings against We spent a lot of time like that, just looking at each the sky. The ground was littered with insect and bird and other, because this was the first time we’d actually hung rat corpses, which were by then decaying. You could com- out since the world ended. I’d felt a burst of love for her, plain that no-one had cleaned up, but our whole corner of there on that stage, but my love, like the rest of me, need- Franklin County looked like this. It was a localized disas- ed time to heal; Jenny had learned some important life ter, but it was a total one, and nothing in Darbyton was lessons, but she’d also hit me repeatedly in the face, and livable any more. as a general rule, people don’t get un-hurt just because Starbucks was still open, though. You still had to go you’ve learned something. I spent most of that summer to the mall to get Starbucks. So Jenny and I were sitting with my mom, driving her to her doctor’s appointments, there, on our usual bench, drinking Frappucinos. or letting her drive me to mine, helping my father anx- She was healing up nicely, I thought. Her hand was still iously cook one thousand pancake breakfasts. It seems bandaged, but that was just Jenny being hyper-conscious strange, that I have to tell you this after everything, but my

220 221 APOCALYPSE 1999 WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER mother didn’t turn me away. “It was magic,” I said. “With innards. Can’t get rid of Anyway, between that and the unexpected develop- innards.” ments with Trevor Murphy — I guess all the name-drop- “Don’t remind me,” Jenny said, rolling her eyes and ping had been him trying to impress me; I’m not saying stirring her straw around her cup. it worked, but my virginity had already saved the world, “How was Timothy’s funeral, by the way?” I said. so I could afford to throw Trevor a bone2 — I had barely “Can you believe my mom made me go to that thing?” seen Jenny. For what it’s worth, I think Jenny needed her Jenny said. “He had, like, a family. They loved him. No-one own time apart, her own vale of solitude. I don’t know would stop talking about it.” exactly how she dealt with it, the Dave thing, but I knew I made a sympathetically aghast face. Jenny was a so- that when I bumped into her outside her FEMA trailer two ciopath, but that was something I knew about her, and I’d weeks after the world ended, she was whispering his name had years of practice. At any rate, it was better than what to herself and crying. most people did when I said the word funeral, which was So we left each other alone, with our changes and our flinch and look slightly to one side of me, as if trying to love and our grief, the wounds we’d given each other and locate a guy whose mom did not have cancer. the wounds we didn’t know we had until they started “The one that got to me was Debra’s,” I said. “Remem- bleeding, and by the time I saw her again, we were still ber? All the singing?” friends, but neither of us knew who we were looking at “Cara Gray didn’t even know Debra!” Jenny yelped. any more. “She just couldn’t pass up the gig!” “I guess I thought everything would go back to normal,” She really couldn’t. She evidently couldn’t learn a new Jenny said, staring out past me at the destroyed courtyard. song, either; she sang “I Dreamed A Dream,” dragging ev- “Eh,” I said. “What’s ‘normal,’ you know?” ery emotional climax out three yards past its end point, as “I mean, I guess I thought the birds would… evaporate? if we were gathered to mourn the end of Debra’s career as Somehow?” Jenny said. “I thought it was magic.” a tragic French sex worker. I thought about asking her to sing something else. “My Heart Will Go On,” maybe; Deb- ra would’ve liked that. But that would require me to admit 2 I will not footnote it. I know he wants me to footnote it. He knows I know he wants me to footnote it. Footnoting it would be that I’d listened to “My Heart Will Go On,” at least once playing right into his hands. in my life, which was the second most embarrassing thing You know who ELSE played right into Nick’s hands? Trevor I’d ever done. The most embarrassing was caring about Murphy.* — Jenny. Debra. “Oh, my God, the eulogies,” Jenny said. “‘The * And how! — Nick. 222 223 APOCALYPSE 1999 WE’RE IN THIS TOGETHER sweetest girl I’ve ever met! Always a kind word when you and I leaned into the comfort of her like family. When she passed her in the hallway!’” spoke, though, her voice was something new; the voice of “Farewell, Debra,” I said. “She’s with Jesus now. And the woman with the sad eyes, the one I was just now get- he thought being nailed to that cross was bad.” ting to know. Jenny cackled, and so did I. We weren’t good people. We “Hardy is in you,” Jenny said. “Your mother is in you. weren’t bad, either; we were just teenagers, making dumb Dave is in me. I don’t like it, but I can’t help it, either. I jokes to survive the horror that surrounded us, rolling our don’t think a soul is a solitary thing, you know? We’re eyes and making fart noises at the void. Every human life possessed even on our best days. Our souls are made up of is unique and irreplaceable, but most human beings are the people we’ve loved.” assholes, and though adulthood is wonderful, and I’m glad I looked at Jenny — my soft-hearted sidekick, my baby I survived to see mine, I will tell you that most of it is just sister; the woman who fucked the Devil and stabbed him trying to resolve that one basic contradiction. in the eyeball — and I knew that it was true. Some part of “I miss Hardy,” I said, suddenly. me was Jenny, and some part of Jenny was me, and even if Jenny’s laughter died. the worst happened, and I never saw her again, we would “He was really good, Jenny,” I said. “Hardy was such a be spinning around each other forever, like twin stars good guy. We never gave him credit for how good he was.” whirling through the night. I had been trying so hard, for “I didn’t,” Jenny said. “But you did. He was probably so long, not to lose anyone, but I could never lose Jen- really happy to be with you, on that last day. You were his ny Long. She was my childhood home and the posters in best friend.” my old bedroom. She was recess and lunchboxes and the I was. Maybe he was mine, too. Hardy was certainly my creak of a swing while my legs pumped in the air. She was something, though it might take me a lifetime to find out a long car drive and an old song and the flat yellow sun- what. He was a voice in the darkness, a place I’d go back shine of an Ohio summer gleaming off the blacktop. Every to in quiet times, trying to remember. He was proof that memory of myself was a memory of her, and even if Jenny we don’t all make it out of high school alive. was no part of my future, we would love each other, as we “I keep thinking I’ll see him,” I said. “I keep expecting loved the children we’d been. that one day, I’ll turn a corner, and he’ll be there. Knowing So the world spun on, that summer and every other, he’s dead doesn’t change it. He’ll just be right around the and if this seems like a lot of build-up for nothing, just corner, forever.” know that the world really did end that day, and you and I “He’s not around the corner,” Jenny said. “He’s in you.” are living in the post-apocalypse right now. Ask yourself: Jenny settled close to me on the bench. She was warm, Has anything felt normal, since the summer of 1999? Has

224 225 APOCALYPSE 1999 anything ever really felt the same? But we live through the end, because the end is always upon us, and the beginning is too; because every new world is built on the ashes of the old one, and every adult surfaces through the vanished body of a child. We just kept going, Jenny Long and I, through college classes and girlfriends and boyfriends and gradu- ations, through shared apartments and roommate fights and moving out and moving away, through presidential elections and terrorist attacks and global pandemics and Christmas parties, through testosterone and childbirth, through funerals and first dates, through climate change, through car crashes, through her engagement, through my wedding, through great joy, through great pain, we just The End kept surviving a thousand different apocalypses, the way you do, the way we all do, the way love always does in this dangerous and endangered world. ( sort of)

226 tifice, Narrative Machines, Party At The World’s End, and Join My Cult!, and editor of the interdisciplinary web journal Credits Modern Mythology. He also co-founded a number of start- ups and music projects you’ve probably never heard of. Editor: Maddox Pennington Maddox Pennington is the nonbinary writer of A Girl Interior Illustration: Benny Hope Walks Into a Book: What the Brontës Taught Me about Life, Benny Hope is a nonbinary, disabled artist living in the Love, and Women’s Work; when they’re not not teaching Pacific Northwest. They love to paint portraits and make college and creative writing, you can find them perform- comics about their life. You can find them marathoning cook- ing stand-up comedy in many of DC’s finest dive bars. ing competition shows and avoiding the great outdoors.

Sensitivity Read: Nathaniel Glanzman Design, Layout and Writing: Sady Doyle Nathaniel Glanzman is a professional sensitivity read- Sady Doyle is the author of Trainwreck: The Women We er and the owner of Glanzman Sensitivity Reading. He Love to Hate, Mock, and Fear… and Why (Melville House, has worked with authors pursuing all avenues of publish- 2016) and Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers: Monstrosity, ing and is always excited to see his clients’ books hit the Patriarchy, and the Fear of Female Power (Melville House, shelves and online marketplaces. He also teaches classes 2019). Dead Blondes was named a Kirkus Best Non-Fiction on what sensitivity reading is and how to become one at Book of 2019 and was shortlisted for Starburst Magazine’s his local writers’ center. He can be reached at glanzman- Brave New Words Award. In addition, Doyle founded the sensitivityreading.com or on Twitter @natglanzman. feminist blog Tiger Beatdown in 2008, writes an ongoing column at GEN, has a prolific freelance journalism career, Sensitivity Read: Inigo Purcell and once did a flowchart about farts for the New York Inigo Purcell is a grad student and writer currently study- Times. ing on a PhD about Arthurian legend at the University of Bristol and Macquarie University. He previously studied at St Edmund’s College, Cambridge and Oxford Brookes Uni- versity, and is working on a novel about political scandal.

Cover Design and Illustration: James Curcio James Curcio is an author, visual artist, audio producer, and editor. He is the author of many books and experimen- tal graphic novels, including MASKS: Bowie & Artists of Ar- And One More Thing...

I first read about the Columbine killers’ Nazi sympathies from the Twitter user @CaseyExplosion; in a non-fiction book, you could do a cite, but I couldn’t, so it’s here. Several people kicked around early, extremely terrible drafts or outlines of this story with me, and if it’s readable, it’s only because they kicked it hard. Profound thanks in particular to Chris Rosa and Benjanun Sridangkaeuw, who took the most time with the worst drafts. The person who read the very first and very worst draft was my husband, Brian. This project only exists because he refused to give it back to me when I was begging him to hand the laptop over so I could delete it. “I want to see what happens,” he said. Basically, what I’m saying is that if you hated this, it’s his fault. Finally: I am just so grateful that Maddox, J, Benny, Na- thaniel, and Inigo agreed to work with me on this project. Each and every one of them made it better, and each and every one is a dream to work with, which is my way of say- ing you should hire them right away. The world of stories is better when more trans and non-binary artists get work, yes, but it is also better because these specific people are working. My love, until the end of the world, to the kids who sat with me in the cafeteria. You know who you are. I’m lucky I do, too. -- Sady Doyle, post-apocalyptic survivor September 2020